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Comment by cgio | Hacker News Reader

A phrase does not mean anything by itself. People mean something when they use it. You could argue that expressions carry some meaning, by virtue of shared use. But your definition does not align with the meaning most people make of this specific expression as you can witness above.

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People misuse expressions. A common one is the customer is always right. The actual wording is the customer is always right in matters of taste but people cut off the ending which changes it from a sensible and useful proverb to a bunch of nonsense. Of course the customer isn't always right. They're always right in terms of what they want to buy, not in all other terms.

Similarly an exception like a lawyer being a good ceo does not prove a rule like lawyers are bad CEOs. It's nonsense. People who don't understand the proverb took it and misused it and then others took after them and here we are, I've been wondering about that proverb my entire life and I never understood how it makes any sense. Now I finally do, and I'm glad the other commenter clarified it

There is a common phenomenon where people claim proverbial quotes were originally longer. One I often hear is “Jack of all trades master of none” originally including the follow up “often better than a master of none.”

If you research this, as well as the customer as always right as you claim, you will find no evidence of their longer ‘original’ forms [1].

[1] https://www.snopes.com/articles/468815/customer-is-always-ri...

On top of what j5r5myk mentioned, there is a fairly good record of the origin on “the customer is always right,” (described on Wikipedia) because it was something like a moderately well known person’s catchphrase, in an era when newspapers and marketing existed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right

There’s some quibbling to be had about the meaning, but it puts it closer to “assume good faith” or something like that, rather than reducing it to just preferences.

> The earliest known printed mention of the phrase is a September 1905 article in the Boston Globe about Field, which describes him as "broadly speaking" adhering to the theory that "the customer is always right".

> However, John William Tebbel was of the opinion that Field never himself actually said such a thing, because he was "no master of idiom". Tebbel rather believed it probable that what Field would have actually said was "Assume the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not."

A lot of people say a lot of stupid things, it does not make them less stupid and incorrect. Unless a million flies can't be wrong!

But the intended insight isn't stupid, and "the exception proves the rule" is a natural, easily-inferred contraction of "the rarity of finding an exception proves the general validity of the rule".

The way most people use it is wrong though and not in the normal "language evolves" way.

The exception of a lawyer being a good CEO does not, in any way, prove that lawyers are not good CEOs .

The phrase "most people mean the wrong thing by this phrase" makes no sense. A phrase means what most people mean by saying it, or understand by hearing it. So, "the exception that proves the rule" is, as its main modern meaning, a joking way of admitting that a rule (especially one that the speaker had argued for) is not actually a universal rule, while maintaining that it generally holds true.

The examples of legal signs and so on are a more specific, technical, meaning that is only used in certain contexts, such as actual legal proceedings or at least informal discussions about laws or contract terms.

When /u/flkiwi above said this phrase, they obviously meant it in the joking sense I gave, and which they had actually explained above. They agree that, in general, lawyers make bad CEOs, but they also personally know of exceptions. This is not "wrong usage", as proven by the fact that everyone who read the comment understood exactly what they meant.

This whole thing reminds me of the people who complain about the use of literally as an amplifier instead of for its primary meaning as "wrong", with seemingly no understanding of how flourishes and rhetoric work (nor even of the history of words like "very", which used to be quite similar to "literally" a long time ago).

Words are just noises. Think of them as pointers. They point to a concept in the brain. What concept that may be differs from person to person. But as long as the words point to something, they aren't used wrongly.

The idea that there was some point in history were the pointer target was officially designated to be x is just false. That point in time never existed.

My point isn't that the use of the phrase is wrong, the point is that the colloquial understanding of the phrase is a bad concept.

[All] lawyers are bad CEOs is a statement that was made. Evidence to the contrary was presented. "The exception proves the rule" was used to dismiss that evidence.

It's used in a similar way as "God works in mysterious ways".

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