Or more succinctly, as first-year law students learn: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius — to state one thing is to implicitly exclude others.
https://definitions.lsd.law/expressio-unius-est-exclusio-alt...
> "The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used…
Personally, I use it in cases like:
- Rule: Don't do X, it's a bad idea.
- Exception: One time, someone with very special circumstances did X, and with a lot of finagling and effort they managed to make it work sort of OK.
Or:
- Rule: This fortress was an impregnable defensive position.
- Exception: In A.D. 1305, the fortress was taken, with great difficulty and many casualties, by an attacking army 100 times larger than the defending force.
Or:
- Rule: This river never overflows its banks.
- Exception: Once in history, on the day of the biggest rainstorm in 1000 years, the river is recorded to have overflowed its banks very slightly for a short time.
The exception proves the rule because the circumstances necessary for the exception to occur were themselves exceptional.
For example, imagine if your skydiving instructor said "if your parachute doesn't open when you jump out of the airplane, you're gonna die", and you replied with "well actually that's not true, Vesna Vulović survived a fall from high altitude." Yeah, okay. The fact that you had to be smarty-pants about it and dig up a random exception really proves the point they were trying to make.
(Also that story is nuts! https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87)
People on this website are so fucking pedantic and argumentative over the most obvious or inconsequential minutiae it drives me nuts.
That they were responding to someone else who couldn't see how it worked means it wasn't just pedantic nitpicking
I didn't say it was personal, I said it was irritating.