“I’ll teach you to think!”

That is — in effect, even if not in those exact words — what almost all of the public-school teachers back in my schooldays said whenever they caught anyone daring to try to think. It’s like the cop back in those same days telling someone who has just called him a “pig” or some other such evaluative name “I’ll teach you to talk to an officer of the law that way!” just before he and his partner slammed that person against the cop car, handcuffed him, and slung him into the back seat of that car to haul him off to jail, as happened to me once. 

                                                      — “They Taught Me to Think”

Every rule needs at least one exception, for “the exception proves the rule,” to put the point in a common way. That holds, at least, if one is using the term rule as one does when, for example, one uses the phrase as a rule.

The phrase as a rule  means the same as the phrase in general. In turn, without exception that latter phrase means something very different from the phrase without exception.

On the other hand, laws, as opposed to rules, are always without exception. There may be exemptions from a law, but there are no exceptions to it.

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Included among all the rules that admit exceptions is the rule I articulate about my own public-school teachers in the lines at the beginning of this post. Those lines come from an earlier post of mine, one I put up on this blogsite a year ago. In that post itself, I mentioned one exception to the above rule about my own school teachers. That exception was my own 10th grade “Western Civilization” teacher who — quite unintentionally, be it noted — allowed me to learn something about thinking by assigning me the task of reading and reporting to the class on John Locke’s Second Essay on Civil Government. I will now cite another exception to that same rule.

Two years before my 10th grade history teacher assigned me to read and report on Locke’s essay, my 8th grade science teacher publicly complimented me for thinking. Part of that science teacher’s routine in class was to ask members of the class about some of the scientific information he was trying to fill us with, as is the standard substitute in public-school systems for true teaching.

One day in class that science teacher asked me what disease involved the inability to drink water, and after thinking about it for a moment I replied with “lock-jaw,” a common term for tetanus. The science teacher corrected me, and said the correct answer — that is, the answer that fit the information he had been feeding us — was rabies. However, he immediately added the compliment of saying that I had obviously been thinking, since lock-jaw does indeed fit the description of the symptom he articulated in his question to me. I appreciated his compliment then and still do, and I compliment my teacher in turn for having given me that compliment, which I well deserved.

Indeed, as a rule those who achieve some task in response to some assignment someone has given them deserve to be complimented, just as my old science teacher complimented me. That is so, even if, once again as in my own example, the task achieved is not identical to the intentions of the one who gave them the assignment in the first place.

Of course, there are some exceptions to that rule.

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 According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (OED) , the verb achieve comes from the presumed Vulgar Latin term accapare. The OED also says that accapare itself derives from the Late Latin phrase ad caput (venire) “to come to a head” (from the prefix ad, “to,” plus caput, “head”).

To bring my own discussion of the need for exceptions to a head, I will also cite three other entries from the OED. Those entries are:

acquire (v.): from ad,"to," here perhaps emphatic, + quaerere, "to seek to obtain.”

assign (v.): c. 1300, "to transfer, convey, bequeath (property); appoint (to someone a task to be done); order, direct (someone to do something); fix, settle, determine; appoint or set (a time); indicate, point out," from Old French assigner, "assign, set (a date, etc.); appoint legally; allot" (13c.), from Latin assignare/adsignare "to mark out, to allot by sign, assign, award," from ad, "to," + signare, "make a sign," from signum, "identifying mark, sign."

task (n.): early 14c., "a quantity of labor imposed as a duty," from Old North French tasque (12c., Old French tasche, Modern French tâche) "duty, tax," from Vulgar Latin *tasca "a duty, assessment," metathesis of Medieval Latin taxa, a back-formation of Latin taxare, "to evaluate, estimate, assess.” General sense of "any piece of work that has to be done" is first recorded 1590s. Phrase take one to task (1680s) preserves the sense that is closer to tax.

I will end this post by assigning my readers the task of listening carefully both to what the OED says about those three terms, and also to what it says about the verb achieve.

I have no expectations about what you will acquire from accomplishing that assigned task, but you have compliments if you do as I’ve asked.