Enduring organizations
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    I assert: "No organization can long endure, united, without a common language."

    Without proof, but also without historical counterexample. However, perhaps I'm just displaying my ignorance.
  • billmcjohn
    Posts: 14
    um, Switzerland?
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    Well, yes, but do the overlapping bilingualisms of Switzerland provide a counterexample or an exception which proves the rule.
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    And the "long endure" provides a certain amount of weasel room :)
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,451
    exception which proves the rule

    Exceptions don't prove rules. At least not like that.

    The phrase means:
    If I find a documented exception to a rule (if deemed pastorally necessary, Communion may be given on the hand rather than the tongue), I can assume that somewhere else there is a rule (communion is to be given on the tongue).

    Your use is a fallacy known as "cliche thinking."
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    from a post at
    http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=137183

    a person writes:

    Switzerland has four languages, German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romansch - but not much bi- or multi-lingualism.

    22 of the 26 cantons are officially monolingual. In the 60s French speakers in Jura succeeded in getting separate cantonal status for their part of a predominantly German-speaking canton.

    Each canton in Switzerland behaves pretty much like a separate country.
  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,934
    Perhaps survival can be due to some outside force. I have been told, for example, that Satan keeps the Anglican communion together to prove that a house divided against itself can stand. ;-)
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    If I bring up Orthodoxy, I'm afraid I may land in hot water... nevertheless, I think it's stood well enough with a multiplicity of languages within it.

    hmm, what else... what about, like, political organizations such as NATO, the EU, or the UN?
  • Maureen
    Posts: 675
    "Prove" in "the exception proves the rule" means "test".
  • MarkThompson
    Posts: 768
    "Prove" in "the exception proves the rule" means "test".

    Not according to Fowler. Rather, the fact that an exception must be expressly granted proves that a rule generally covers the matter.
  • IanWIanW
    Posts: 756
    ... and that there are particular ways in which the exception differs from the generality that are the reason for its freedom from the rule, which it thereby confirms.
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,451
    Orthodoxy isn't an organization. Neither, really, is the Anglican Communion.

    And those worldwide political organizations have hardly endured long.
  • Chrism
    Posts: 868
    FYI--The UN has boiled down the number of languages to 6 working languages, NATO to 2, and the EC to 3.

    None of these organizations has yet long endured.
  • Maureen
    Posts: 675
    Re: Fowler -- He's talking about what it's come to mean, in the usage of his time. I'm talking about the original meaning of the saying.

    In the original meaning, something fireproof or waterproof was something that had been tested against fire or water, and proven to be what we would call "fireproof" or "waterproof". Nowadays, while some sample may be tested, we don't think of "fireproof" as meaning "experimentally tested against fire". This is unfortunately, because a lot of people think procedures are foolproof without ever testing them against fools. :)

    The exception provides a certain amount of proof of the rule by testing the rule's limits. Showing where the rule does and does not apply makes the rule have more force where it does apply.
  • MarkThompson
    Posts: 768
    Maureen,

    That is, as far as I understand it, a common misconception. See [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. (But cf. [6], [7].) I've never understood why anyone would need a maxim to say that an exception "tests the rule," since in fact it disproves the alleged rule. Rather, as with expressio unius, exclusio alterius, it makes complete sense that an exceptio, an act of excepting, confirms that there is a rule for cases not excepted. (All right, that's far enough off-topic for now. :)
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