Yesterday Rob S wrote to ask about a sentence from the newspaper ("Women's Work and Japan's Hostess Culture", NYT, 8/11/2009):
"A recent New York Times article described the Japanese profession of hostessing, which involves entertaining men at establishments where customers pay a lot to flirt and drink with young women (services that do not, as a rule, involve prostitution)."
So, does this quote mean that there exists a rule that says it cannot involve prostitution? Or is it rather stating that there is no rule that it must involve prostitution?
Is it forbidden, or just not required?
I responded, somewhat unsympathetically, with the opinion that "as a rule" is just a quantifier over instances, meaning something like "in general" or "in most cases", and not evoking any concept of a rule in the deontic sense at all. This invalidated Rob's curiosity about "whether there was the absence of some rule mandating it, or the presence of a rule forbidding it".
Rob was a bit disappointed, I think, so I decided to try to do better, first by confirming my impression of how the expression "as a rule" is now used, and second by tracing its history to see if his interpretation has a basis in the past.
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