I've always thought the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" is nonsense, btw. There's no such "proof."
a) the rule is a heuristic, not a hard-and-fast rule, and
b) the notability of exceptions suggests that the heuristic is pretty good.
In other words, if the exception is, in fact, exceptional, it reinforces that the heuristic is reasonably valid for non-exceptional cases.
In this case, the fact that it took the intervention of the family-friend-who-works-at-Google-HQ to resolve a pay dispute is an exceptional circumstance, and reinforces that for most people, because presumably most people don't have a family friend who works at Google HQ, there is no recourse to pay disputes.
Hence, the exception—by being exceptional—proves the heuristic rule that most employees of these contractor corps have little power to negotiate for their rights.
You have no proof that it was exceptional. All you have is one case. You have no idea what other people in pay disputes end up doing.
Metaphorically.
I mean, while we're being pedantic we may as well get it right.
Or to go with synonyms. Solicits the question. Entreats the question. These are the literal meanings of the words, and they work fine.
> You have no idea what other people in pay disputes end up doing.
But also this is a super weak argument. I don’t have “no idea”—I have an educated guess that most people don’t have family friends who work at Google. Most people don’t have the resources to sue an employer over a few hours of unpaid labor. Wage theft is one of the most extensive unprosecuted crimes, that’s been studied and shown many times.
Are you suggesting that one should assume that most low-level employees in pay disputes get happy outcomes? That seems…naive.
The German cognate would be "prüfen", the Swedish probably "pröva".
So, the exception tests the rule.
[1] And the standard is, of course, a reference exemplar of some sort.
I always wondered about that word. If you want to test yeast, you just put it in some sugar water & see if it foams.
But then, I guess you can't do that if it's mixed with flour & other stuff?
It still retains that archaic meaning in the phrase you mentioned and terms like "proving grounds".
Edit:
And like so many other proverbs like "A few bad apples", "Blood is thicker than water", "Carpe diem", "The exception proves the rule" means exactly the opposite of what most people think it does.
I’m bringing this up because, for many years, I was one of the folk who spread the idea that it actually was supposed to mean “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” But there’s no strong historical basis for this, lovely as the idea may be.
—
As for the “bad apple” one, I didn’t realize that it was commonly misunderstood. I always felt like someone mentioning that someone was “a bad apple” was an almost violent accusation: the person needed to be extricated from the group, less the group become infected by their corruption. I am now trying to think back to times when I’ve heard this one used and wondering if I misunderstood the intent.
Yes but "There is little evidence of the phrase being used in this second way.", citations located at wikipedia.
So I think it makes more sense to go with the interpretation of "if someone lists an exception, then that's proof of a more general rule that it's an exception from". But with that use, something specifically has to be an exception. Anyone applying "exception proves the rule" to an anecdote is using it wrong.
It means that if someone bothers to write an exception in a law, say e.g. "but in case window is broken by stone smaller than 1 cm in diameter, then it's the owner of the window that should pay reparations", then in the general case it's likely the thrower of the stone that pays, otherwise there would have been no point in adding so specific an exception.
When you see text "kids under age of 3 years don't have to pay", you can conclude that older people are supposed to pay.
The analogy for Google situation would be if hypothetically someone found an internal e-mail written by the boss of Google HR department saying "contractors who have relatives in Google, or who have published their story on Hacker News front page, need to be fully paid for their work". Then we could conclude that other contractors typically don't get fully paid, even if there is nothing in the e-mail saying that.
I disagree with most of the commenters that want to apply the phrase to heuristic claims.
Some how it's morphed to colloquially mean "yes, that one exception aside, I'm right and you're wrong" as if the negative somehow reinforces the positive..
The phrase "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" helps understand this. The pudding may prove to be bad or good. Find which proof by eating it.
Logically the statement says nothing beyond what it says, but implicitly by providing the exception you’re stating that the general rule is different.
It’s a perfectly rational linguistic argument, though often misused outside of that context.
The argument is that not being able to reject the null hypothesis means that the null hypothesis is correct. This is an invalid argument. We're sorry but we can not accept your submission at this time.