Begging the Question

My brother Ben wrote to me to complain about my excessively modern usage of the phrase “beg the question”, thereby leaving my father as the only member of my family who doesn’t write to me mainly to criticize my mauling of the English language here on Peer Pressure (because he’s the only one who doesn’t read it?). Of course, it’s easy to point fingers when you don’t even have your own blog. Start one, people, and then we can talk. But be forewarned: split one infinitive and I’ll be all over you.

But seriously, Ben pointed me to a Wikipedia article whose main message seems to be that people who criticize the newer usage of the phrase are hopeless pedants. As a linguist, I often find myself arguing that the only criterion for “right” in language is how people actually speak. After all, language evolves, and if the prescripters had their way we’d still be talking like Chaucer (or Beowulf, for that matter). But I guess there’s no point in baiting the wordanistas. The best policy is doubtless to avoid the phrase altogether.

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5 Comments »

1. Thanks Ben, I couldn’t agree more.

   Comment by Abigail — 3/8/2006 @ 5:43 pm

2. As far as language evolution goes. . .I suggest you read George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English language”.

   Comment by Patrick — 3/8/2006 @ 7:16 pm

3. well the wikipedia entry got it only partly right. language evolves, but when it evolves for the worse, our ability to communicate properly (unambiguously, quickly, …) is diminished and something should be done against that. inventing new phrases and idioms is fine (and fun!), but i wouldn’t cheer “yay for progress!” every time someone uses an expression without having a clue what it actually means.

   “doubtless” should be “doubtlessly”. i’m a hopeless pedant.

   Comment by nex — 3/16/2006 @ 4:28 pm

4. I loved nex’s comment regarding language evolution vs devolution and increasing misuse of “begging the question”. Recently I initiated a couple of alerts using the experimental Google Alerts service, which sends me one email daily containing every instance found in news reports or via web spidering of the string “begging the question” and another for the far more common “begs the question” (guess how I found this blog?). Some observations: “Begs” is much more common than “Begging”, and I’d say about half the news articles using “begs” (sometimes I see 60 or 70 of these per day) are from sportswriters. I suspect that in a couple of decades the misuse will completely replace the current meaning as we know it. At least, that is how I feel after watching the malaprop seem to swamp the real meaning in current usage. I’m certain that use of “begs” has already passed the irritating “irregardless” in common parlance. Hey, now there is another one I should set an Alert for. Tad Cook, pedantic in Seattle.

   Comment by Tad Cook — 3/20/2006 @ 1:29 am

5. two specific things with written language drive me to madness. not so much modern usage” issues as they are persistent, avoidable, outright errors; the near-random usage of apostrophes that can be seen everywhere (for plurals, incorrect association, etc), and the staggering number of people that seem to think “lose” has a double “o”! i occasionally fantasise about beating such people to death, shouting “that’s a completely different word, it does not mean what you think, stop it, argh!” why this particular error drives me to such disproportionate anger is clearly something i need to think about…

   (slashdot especially seems to be entirely made up of the latter group… )

   ah well… bob the angry flower said it best: http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

   Comment by ayembee — 3/25/2006 @ 5:31 pm

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