Pedantry over the use/misuse of the phrase "beg the question": classic or dud

Just say "raise the question" if that's what you mean.

V. classic.

its really important to point this out every time its misused

it's

nah joking pedants are the worst human beings in the world, worse than genocidal dictators tbh

but it does beg the question whether they're worse than fascist dictators

and also slightly obtuse in their refusal to recognise that meaning shifts over time whether they want it to or not and that if a significant number of people understand a phrase to have a particular meaning then hey! it has that meaning, sorry

having said that, anybody who doesn't realise that the original phrase was "another think coming" is beyond polite society

^^^ that may be the exception that proves the rule

Prove in the old sense I take it.

YES EVERYBODY WHO USES IT RONG IS RONG

i wd like to write a book about the last guy in England who uses "nice" to mean "precise" and how he wages an 18th century Unabomber campaign against people who keep using it to mean "nice"

NV is the Anti-Pedant

coming soon to a cinema near you

certificate zzzzzzz

Don't care in conversation, will usually change it when editing copy - pacifies pedant readership + it's not a likeable phrase anyway – more cliché than handy idiom.

actually thinking about it there is something cute and quaint about the thriving of grammar advice websites, like the old worries about social etiquette as marker of yr class origins are still chugging along nicely and which way shd one pass the stilton after dinner

i accept that copy-editing still has a standard of precision to maintain fwiw

generally i try to be relaxed about idiom pedantry but this particular phrase actually contains a useful idea (the logical fallacy) and the misuse gains us nothing in English and loses the preciseness of the original meaning. so a rare case where i'll pedant all over it.

Best thing you will ever read on this subject:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290

what this used to mean doesn't matter past a certain tipping-point tbh, NV otm

ledge is right about that article he linked

it matters to the extent that we can only really understand our world through the language we have to describe it, and having 'beg the question' is really important in a world where political statements routinely are founded on premises that are never explained, or even made explicit (all kinds of dog-whistles, and cat-whistles, and racist-whistles), not to mention first principles that ppl love to gloss over either bc they're a) embarrassed about or think stating the original principle would undermine their point, or b) they haven't thought it through clearly themselves. by contrast, the new meaning has a number of synonyms, not to mention being a less useful idea (since it's pretty much the idea of: i have a question). xp

i wd like to write a book about the last guy in England who uses "nice" to mean "precise" and how he wages an 18th century Unabomber campaign against people who keep using it to mean "nice"

nice is really mad in this regard - starts as ignorant, bursts into wanton, lazy, strange, elegant, effeminate, shy before it settles down a bit.

nah that's not 'beg the question' that's 'i think yr premise is suspect'.

If you're going to stress how important language is as a purely communicative tool, insistence on slavish devotion to metaphorical phraseology derived clumsily from the latin mightn't be preferable to a clearer definition of the term

I like "another thing coming". It evokes something unnamed and terrible and imminent, whereas "another think coming" just means you might change your mind. Cthulu vs Clegg.

nice is really mad in this regard

yeah i was reading some of the etymology earlier which made me think - i am warm to its hatedness by modern prose authorities too, i had at least one English teacher who refused to let us use the word, to the point of blind truculence tbh. there's a sweet Austen quote echoing the same sentiment. and yet i think languages are enriched for having all-purpose Zelig-words lurking amongst them.

"I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should I not call it so?" "Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk; and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything."

just reading that as 'nice' tbh

nah that's not 'beg the question' that's 'i think yr premise is suspect'.

what's the verb form of this? 'assuming the premise' works, but not exactly common usage that has replaced 'begging the question.'

'assuming the premise' works well and is pretty clear vs 'begs the question' imo

This thread is awful, artificial, and amusing.

maybe i am a little more of a prescriptivist than i'd like to think. it's a little unpleasant raging against language as it changes naturally, and obv all kinds of cultural/class/racial baggage attached to that kind of endeavor. still, this particular example feels different than most other natural changes which often change for good reason. 'begging the question' has changed simply bc ppl never learnt what it meant, they saw it written somewhere, and they made up this new definition. 'nonplussed' is another one that annoys me since it clearly comes from conflation with nonchalant, or someone reasoning out that is means 'to not be plussed' and i guess being plussed is being bothered, so nonplussed now means being disaffected or whatever.

I had this weird kid's book where "nice" (the word) was personified as a chubby rainbow-dressed sprite that hung out in a school room, feeling helpful and sweet every time a kid described something as "nice." The teacher started a "use other words" campaign & introduced more floral/precise adjectives for nice things. These adjectives were depicted as ghastly trolls acting rotten towards poor little "nice." That book gave me a lot of weird feelings about putting a moratorium on an all-purpose word/rainbow sprite.

Yeah, "beg the question" annoys me when I hear it misused, but it's so far gone, that I kind of feel like it's tilting at windmills to be pedantic about it. I avoid using it myself, though.

I dislike pedantry over it just because I really can't stand being dressed down with sentences that start with, "ACTUALLY..." Really the only time you should be saying "ACTUALLY" in all-caps like that is if you dropped it as a bingo in Scrabble, in which case, gloat away.

wd prefer it if people used their own pedantry as a reason to give you an informative explanation of etymology or something rather than trying to hold back the barbarian tide, yes

The real meaning of this phrase appears to be very hard to extemporaneously explain, I have found in asking usage grouches to share the phrase's non-abused meaning.

I recently "ACTUALLY..." informed someone the eskimos didn't have a bajillion words for snow, then felt bad afterwards.

I still don't understand what "beg the question" really means, tbh, even after reading that link.

In actual fact..

"Assumes the conclusion". Which you want to be proving in the conclusion, not assuming in yr premises.

it means making a statement where you haven't adequately argued the premise, no?

xp Well that was stupidly put.

I just use "raises the principii."

you might be escorted off someone elses premises.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the-question.html

it means making a statement where you haven't adequately argued the premise, no?

in its narrowest sense, it's assuming something that you're meant to be in the process of proving.

i think

it tries to cross out the disputem in favour of the qoud

Given that "circular reasoning" is understood by people who have never read 16th century logic books or English pedantry books, I see no real reason to cling to the original meaning of this clumsy phrase

it seems pretty much everyone at first assumes it means "raises the question" without ever realising there's any other possibility, until some confusing pedant tells them it means something else but is usually unable to explain what or why anyone would ever use it - so maybe it should just mean that thing, y'know?

(PS sometimes I think I am now p. chill and descriptivist but a few glimpses of the American usage of "nonplussed" or how young people type on their Facebooks and Bebos and suddenly prescriptivism seems like a good idea again)

circular reasoning and begging the question are logical fallacies though

sorry, *different* logical fallacies

though now im reading that apparently circular reasoning isnt even technically a fallacy

this is all according to aristotle

f that guy

we need euler or drew daniel here to figure this out

i thought that Anselm's ontological proof of God was a form of begging the question tbh

even looking for it is

pretty much every attempt to prove the existence of god amounts to begging the question

well, yes

once i got to the part about "nice," scrolled down to post the austen quote, found out NV has obviated my existence on ilx :(

you're nicer than he is, tbf

truth.

i'll quit if it makes you feel better horseshoe

<3 "usage grouches"

i'll quit if it makes you feel better horseshoe

― FPocalypto! (Noodle Vague), Thursday, March 1, 2012 1:01 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i forbid it!

let's be honest it was probly an empty promise

fuck this, i'll beg whatever i want

sorry just got excited for a second there

This is a classic case of a specialist jargon getting loose in the wider world and changing its meaning. The specialists who want exclusive use of the jargon for their own purposes hate this, because it muddies the waters in their own narrow world. The wider world, as usual, doesn't give a shit.

Pointing it out to people will not do any good. You will be steamrolled and your protests will only brand you as a pedant.

http://www.qwantz.com/comics/comic2-724.png

okay but euler, what is the difference between circular arugments and begging the question, according to aristotle, provide examples please

begging the question is when you assume what you're trying to prove, but not explicitly (e.g. "T-Rex is a pretty sweet dude because he's always so friggin' awesome!")

circular reasoning is when you reason explicitly from what you're trying to prove (e.g. "T-Rex is a pretty sweet dude because he's always so friggin' awesome, & he's always so friggin' awesome because he is a pretty sweet dude")

thank you

idk at least the words that make up the phrase 'begging the question' make sense when the phrase is misused - the wrong definition really does seem, intuitively, like the right one.

unlike, say, IRREGARDLESS, which is just batshitinsane.

descriptivism 4 eva

it's not like the 'proper use' is the only way to point out this particular logical fallacy

its really important to point this out every time its misused

― max, Thursday, March 1, 2012 8:26 AM (12 hours ago)

^^

in fact i bet if you search "beg the question" you'll get a bunch of people misusing it and max and me telling them they used it wrong

that begs the question 'why are you such dicks?'

i mean we can get into descriptivism vs prescriptivism but at a certain point you just need to realize that if you use it to mean 'raise the question' you're wrong

no actually u r wrong because you believe that there exists a right outside of how people use language

prescriptivism is like a weird lil religion

WORD NOTES beg
In its main function, to beg serves as an improved modern synonym for the old crave, which now
sounds very affected. Both verbs mean "to request earnestly" and imply a sort of subordinate
position—I beg a favor, but I demand a right. (Beseech and implore are close to beg, but these
bigger words imply a little extra anxiety and/or urgency.) As of 2004, the only really egregious way
you can screw up with beg is to misuse the phrase beg the question. This phrase does not—repeat,
not—mean "invite the following obvious question," and sentences like This begs the question, why
are our elected leaders silent on this issue? are both increasingly common and deeply wrong. The
idiom beg the question is a compressed Anglicization of the Latin petitio principii, which is the name
of a particular kind of logical fallacy where one bases a conclusion on a premise that turns out to be
just as debatable as the conclusion itself. Genuine examples of begging the question are things like
The death penalty is the just punishment for murder because those who kill forfeit their own right to
life and True wisdom is speaking and acting judiciously. Because of its extremely specific origin and
meaning, beg the question will never mean "invite the question" no matter how widespread the usage
becomes. Nor, strictly speaking, will it ever mean "avoid or ignore the real issue," even though a a
subsidiary def of beg is "to dodge or evade." If you want to accuse someone of missing the point,
you can say You're begging the real issue or something; but it's a boner to use even this sense of
beg with question unless you're talking about a true petitio principii.
DFW

re descriptivism/prescriptivism, i think it really doesn't matter to anyone or anything if you end a sentence with a preposition or not. or split an infinitive. i try not to do either of those things bc all things being equal i guess i'd rather present myself as someone who knows those rules of language. but in terms of the english language, if both those rules are gone in fifty years, i think it won't matter to anyone. but i guess i am more attached to things meaning what they used to mean, or at least having that old meaning still be resonant + relevant alongside the newer meaning. i don't know why i feel like one is more important than the other. maybe form v content?

oh wow another member of the weird lil religion xp

no actually u r wrong because you believe that there exists a right outside of how people use language

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:01 PM (4 minutes ago)

i'm not a strict prescriptivist in this sense but yes there are certain words or phrases you should avoid if you don't want to look like an idiot

I hate seeing 'beg the question' misused but I've given up on saying anything - I'll just think you're one of those people that says things they don't understand.
I think I first heard it in the context of logical fallacies so it's always weirded me out when people misuse it, particularly when 'raise the question' is so much more apt and already exists.

Holy shit, I never realized that "nonplussed" had this meaning until now (despite being North American)!:

2 N. Amer. informal not disconcerted; unperturbed.

In both cases, though, I feel like I don't hear the word/phrase being used in the 'wrong'/'new' way all that often so I guess I'm having trouble seeing this as a strictly prescriptivist/descriptivist issue. Neither "nonplussed" nor "beg the question" really seem like everyday colloquial speech to me, with any meaning.

I'll just think you're one of those people that says things they don't understand.

this pretty much otm. among a certain group educated ppl you still need to use these things correctly. but that's more of a signaling issue than an ethical issue

i think it really doesn't matter to anyone or anything if you end a sentence with a preposition or not. or split an infinitive. i try not to do either of those things bc all things being equal i guess i'd rather present myself as someone who knows those rules of language. but in terms of the english language, if both those rules are gone in fifty years, i think it won't matter to anyone.

I'm probably a bit of a grammar snob and I think both of those rules are gone now, if they were ever rules in the first place.

sure and I don't dress in all-neon yellow cause I 'don't want to look like an idiot' but it's still entirely dependent on social and cultural context and not due to the fact that neon yellow is objectively more or less ridiculous than any other color

everything you do exists within these contexts, including your use of language. using 'proper language' will make certain people assume certain things about you and make other people assume other things abot you.

but there is no 'right'.

xp

I'm probably a bit of a grammar snob

(My preceding post probably undermines this statement a little.)

well there is a right but that right is dependent on deeper grammatical rules etc. etc.

xp to myself

I'm probably a bit of a grammar snob and I think both of those rules are gone now, if they were ever rules in the first place.

you can thank this guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowth

there is a sort of levinasian ethics maybe, where you have an obligation to the meaning of words to carry their meanings over hundreds and thousands of years. but i think there's a similar obligation to watch it evolve and change inevitably. maybe there's a tension between the two obligations?

there's no obligation, it just happens, always, forever

it's one of those hazy obligations to the self + community

sure and I don't dress in all-neon yellow cause I 'don't want to look like an idiot' but it's still entirely dependent on social and cultural context and not due to the fact that neon yellow is objectively more or less ridiculous than any other color

everything you do exists within these contexts, including your use of language. using 'proper language' will make certain people assume certain things about you and make other people assume other things abot you.

but there is no 'right'.

xp

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:11 PM (3 minutes ago)

oh yeah i agree - but this doesn't really defend the merits of language creep as much as it affirms that it exists & descriptivism exists

i mean i'm not going out and correcting people on my twitter feed or rando dudes i play basketball with, but yeah in formal writing - or even on ilx, where ppl 'should know better' or might at least be amenable to this kind of ribbing - i think there's a value in precision and in enforcing it

but even 'formal writing' is something with artificially defined boundaries. language creep doesn't need to be defended because it does not exist as an isolated idea, it's just part of the big picture of what language is.

just bc language is bones on top of bones on top of bones doesn't mean we can't mourn things as they change

no you can totally do it, but it makes you a language republican

lol as if the republican party cares about precision of thought + language

man I'm still not sure I actually understand this phrase after years of trying (just because "begs" parses weird for me, even knowing Latin) but pedants >>>>> people who think pedantry is OMG WHAT COULD B WORSE THAN PEDANTRY

like to me people who hate on pedantry hard are v. v. v. v. similar to Rick Santorum hating on people who went to college

I don't think these people are pedants, that's the thing, they are followers of a weird religion

I'm the pedant

I stopped giving a shit about being labelled a pedant when my crazy neighbour accused me of it when I was trying to make her pay (something towards) the hundreds of pounds of extra building work she managed to cause by never saying what she means or saying when she simply doesn't understand something or just being crazy.

no actually u r wrong because you believe that there exists a right outside of how people use language

...prescriptivism is like a weird lil religion

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 6:03 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

this line of thinking strikes me as very odd. for the most part, we teach language to one another prescriptively. even if we acknowledge in our pedagogy that language changes, we're likely still concentrating mostly on what words mean and how grammar works; i.e., passing along a set of prescriptive rules. of course we learn, in a sense, descriptively, by observing the ways in which those around us use language and following suit. in other words, there's no clear line of separation, both of these two approaches have to exist in order for language to function properly. we require prescriptivism to promulgate a widely shared and more or less uniform linguistic culture, and we require descriptivism to keep track of how language is actually used.

no actually people managed to have and learn languages before english-teacher style prescriptivism existed

The reason I got scared out of being a teacher seven years ago, when I first thought I wanted to teach, was a textbook of research on just how hard it is to teach grammar (or, more precisely, a summary of research showing hugely varied information on the effectiveness/usefulness of direct grammar instruction). I have worked on just one thing this year w/my kids, apostrophe usage, and I'll just say, introducing and enforcing a "uniform linguistic culture" is super fucking hard. Hats off to you if you're better than I am at teaching it. I'm new, but still.

unteaching it is even harder!

no actually people managed to have and learn languages before english-teacher style prescriptivism existed

sure, but with massive amounts of local variation and very low literacy rates, which wouldn't really fly in the contemporary world. i don't know of any examples of widespread literacy being successfully promoted through non-prescriptive means.

i mean, "english teacher style prescriptivism" seems to have existed for about as long as people have been teaching one another to read and write, and i don't imagine that such education could be efficiently accomplished w/out it.

I think everyone on ILX probably has a natural aptitude in the grammar & writing fusspot arena. Look at any thread about childhood literacy, it's a bunch of people trumpeting about how they all wrote their first cinquain at age 4. I am not trying to be anti-intellectual in saying this but I think maybe we're a self-selected group of people for whom this shit is easy. I don't even know why I'm pointing this out except wishing my classroom reflected whatever the fuck is happening in this debate.

Like seriously a world where the worst you have to worry about as far as usage is a hand to understand phrase being melted in the hot descriptive sun. Where is this world??

About 7xpost to iatee

no actually people managed to have and learn languages before english-teacher style prescriptivism existed

But grammar/spelling education is just a formalization/socialization of the basic prescriptivism that's involved when anyone learns a language: my parents taught me that I needed to use certain sounds in certain combinations in order to form meaningful words, that I needed to draw certain shapes in certain orders to spell meaningful words, etc. I didn't just pick these things up. I'm sure you'd agree that that level of prescriptivism is acceptable. So is this really just a question of which conventions we choose to hold on to?

there is no such thing as 'prescriptive means' or 'non-prescriptive means'. there are certain accepted linguistic standards that can help us communication clearly in certain contexts. standardization can be useful, for sure. but there's a difference between standardization and 'truth' and 'standard' can often lag behind actual changes in language because 'keepers of the standards' believe them to be something more than a standard.

xp

while we're being prescriptivist, you don't have to say "xpost" if you quote the post you're responding to :)

Ha.

when i first got to ilx i couldn't figure out what xp meant bc on newsgroups it always meant that the message was crossposted to other threads/forums

Oh, maybe that's why no one else seems to understand it when I use it in other places.

no actually people managed to have and learn languages before english-teacher style prescriptivism existed

not written ones - languages that produce eg literature and laws have need of prescriptive grammars

like I think where people get aggro is they guess that prescriptivists are saying that because prescriptivism is the best way to go with written languages, therefore prior languages are lesser - that isn't so - but if you're going to do the things with language that literature and law does, then you're going to want prescriptive rules & to stay close to them

but there's a difference between standardization and 'truth' and 'standard' can often lag behind actual changes in language because 'keepers of the standards' believe them to be something more than a standard.

oh sure, but there's a natural back and forth tension between the keepers of any given flame and the "natural" progress of change. where language is concerned, there aren't really any good guys or bad guys. too little prescription, and language fragments, loses its universality and specificity. too much and the "prescriptions" become ossified and disconnected from actual usage. ideal is somewhere in the middle and is only maintained by the tension at the extremes.

also, aero otm

not written ones - languages that produce eg literature and laws have need of prescriptive grammars

writing does require a set of standards, it does not 'need prescriptive grammars'

Aero totally OTM. Also bring back English grammar education in North American public schools.

"Also, bring back..."

english does not 'have a prescriptive grammar', it has some people who think 'prescriptive grammar' exists as something more than a figment of their imagination. despite having a grammar that has changed substantially over the years, we have managed to produce literature.

I'm not against teaching english in high school

I just want it taught by linguists

english does not 'have a prescriptive grammar', it has some people who think 'prescriptive grammar' exists as something more than a figment of their imagination. despite having a grammar that has changed substantially over the years, we have managed to produce literature.

I'm still not clear on where you draw the line: it seems that we do need to prescribe certain rules and conventions (at least to infants, as in the examples I gave) in order to have a language at all.

infants don't learn language through grammar books, they learn language from hearing people talk

iatee you're being pretty libertarian about this tbh

they learn language from hearing people talk

Yeah, that seems true enough, to a point (but do parents never correct or instruct them?). But my parents did teach me to read and write as well, although I suppose I wasn't quite an infant by that point. And it seems like it would be harder to just pick that up.

no way, everyone else is a language republican

prescriptivism is p conservative and lots of these things can have social consequences (eg white people english on standardized tests helps people who grow up w/ the grammatical standards of white people english)

xp to kev

I just want it taught by linguists

This is interesting to me. First of all, current high school English education is not especially prescriptivist imo. And afaik it's not taught by people who were heavily formally trained in English grammar. I'm trying to work out whether professional linguists would actually be less 'prescriptivist'.

(I'm not white btw.)

that's an argument for more equality in education, not against prescriptivism

xp to iatee

the fact that we treat one variant of the language as the prestige dialect but don't teach people that the prestige dialect is just anothe dialect benefits the people who happen to speak the prestige dialect

another

'equaity in education' would entail white people having to take standardized tests in other dialects of english

equality

doesn't it make u at least a little self-conscious to quote a DFW article so freely w/out attributing it?

I'm starting to want to question whether all white people really speak what you're calling "white people English".

despite having a grammar that has changed substantially over the years, we have managed to produce literature.

yes, thanks to nameless legions of prescriptively-minded language teachers

they don't, I'm just using the phrase as a shortcut xp

the fact that we treat one variant of the language as the prestige dialect but don't teach people that the prestige dialect is just anothe dialect benefits the people who happen to speak the prestige dialect

You're actually raising valid questions but for the sake of argument, do you see any value to having e.g. the laws of a country remain consistently in one dialect? And if so, would it not make sense to train people in that dialect?

there are def values in standards as I said before, but otoh it's important to not treat a standard as anything more than a contextually useful tool. there is no truth or goodness to it.

'equaity in education' would entail white people having to take standardized tests in other dialects of english

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 8:08 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol. but first you'd need a bunch of prescriptivists to efficiently and universally teach the rules of these other dialects before such testing could take place, right?

no, you would need descriptivists to look at how the dialects work and ~describe~ their features not ~decide what they are~

otoh it's important to not treat a standard as anything more than a contextually useful tool. there is no truth or goodness to it.

Oh, OK, that makes some sense. Maybe we're disagreeing less than I thought.

I mean, I train people in the rules of common-practice harmony (which is essentially a linguistic education), docking marks if they write a parallel fifth etc, but I also feel no need to write that way.

Btw, what was puzzling me was that I thought you and I were both on the 'prescriptivist' side when it came to the definition of "socialism"!

there is a grammatically correct form to african-american vernacular english. you can speak it incorrectly (see: white people making fun of it). but nobody 'decided what it was'.

no, you would need descriptivists to look at how the dialects work and ~describe~ their features not ~decide what they are~

And then tell people what those features are and how to use them, i.e. prescribe?

xpost

there is no truth or goodness to it.

oh, pooh. and there is no such thing as "truth", man. i mean, sure, that's true, but so what? uptight prescriptivists are hardly the equivalent of religious fundamentalists, and i think they provide a valuable service. seems churlish to be all pedantic the fact that they don't have a lock on linguistic truth and goodness.

no way, my argument in the socialist thread was that it mean 100 different things and it's important to understand the context and history of the word and to define it in use because it can mean so many different things xp

'telling people how something is used' is not necessarily prescriptivism when you're actually telling them how people today use the language

guys iatee is I feel in his "absolutely no way I could possibly be mistaken on this one" zone imo, abandon ship

Maybe I'm confused about what "prescriptivism" means then.
xpost

it's true, there is absolutely no way I can be mistaken when it comes to super basic linguistic stuff that english teachers still don't understand

And then tell people what those features are and how to use them, i.e. prescribe?

yeah, that's been my point from the beginning. you need descriptivists and a descriptive method/mindset to accurately observe and document the actual use of language. meanwhile, you need prescriptivists and a prescriptive method/mindset to accurately and consistently educate others in the more complex aspects of language use.

taking aero's advice, tho

you just don't know what the word means then

guess I'm a prescriptivist about that

maybe standards are useful after all

arrgh. xp to about ten posts prior.

Yes. And that necessity within a profession such as law constitutes what I would identify as a specialist jargon. Those within the specialty are required to use that jargon with precision and knowledge. Those who are not, do not carry that weight. They only speak to be understood.

I would also make a distinction between law and literature that aero did not make. Literature requires a certain level of nuance, but it also requires an audience, and those who write it must balance between what a word has meant and what it is coming to mean. A purely prescriptive methodology for literary language leads to the archaisms and artificiality of Chinese or Sanscrit literature. Such literature still has its excellencies, but it is no longer a thriving literature at that point.

• Linguistics attempting to impose rules of correct usage on the users of a language: a prescriptive grammar book. Often contrasted with descriptive.

'telling people how something is used' would seem to fit into this, wouldn't it?

many xposts

no, only when you are telling them that 'correct' exists outside of how people actually use language

(That was one definition of "prescriptive" from the Oxford British Dictionary of English. "Linguistics" should be in bold.)

xpost

no, only when you are telling them that 'correct' exists outside of how people actually use language

Really? OK, maybe we were working with different definitions then.

prescriptivists and descriptivists both agree that 'I iatee am' is an incorrect sentence. only prescriptivists think 'yeah that's something I have a lot of' is an incorrect sentence.

okay, i lied

'telling people how something is used' is not necessarily prescriptivism when you're actually telling them how people today use the language

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 8:20 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, but education in the more complex aspects of language use, reading and writing, etc is traditionally deeply prescriptive on a philosophical level. i.e., there is one correct way to spell, define, pronounce, read and write this word; words have fixed meanings; grammatical structures can be parsed incorrectly and correctly; etc. this sort of insistence on correctness is the essence of prescriptivism, and it's the essence of language instruction.

if you can come up with a truly, philosophically non-prescriptive way that such things might be efficiently and consistently taught, i'd love to hear it.

the fact that we treat one variant of the language as the prestige dialect but don't teach people that the prestige dialect is just anothe dialect benefits the people who happen to speak the prestige dialect

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:07 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

another

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:07 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'equaity in education' would entail white people having to take standardized tests in other dialects of english

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:08 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sociologically i agree with pretty much all the points you're making. we're kind of veering from the original context of this thread though - within an academic or formal writing context, a writer does not have the free reign to ignore the conventions specific to that institution. i admit i'm concerned less, at least in this debate, with this as a practical matter than as a way to evaluate writing as an art

thats prob pretty mangled sorry I'm trying to think and watch basketball at the same time

a writer has as much free reign as the institution allows. but that's not what this thread was about, this thread was about people casualy 'misusing' the phrase.

there is a grammatically correct form to african-american vernacular english. you can speak it incorrectly (see: white people making fun of it). but nobody 'decided what it was'.

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:17 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thissss is actually kind of what i'm meaning to get at

casually

I think you guys just don't know what prescriptivism is!

and the equation of prescriptivism with claims to absolute truth is silly. prescriptivism is simply the insistence that there are correct and incorrect ways to use language, and it can happily coexist with an awareness that language changes over time.

people who are 'misusing african-american vernacular english' aren't misusing it because they are breaking the rules taught to them by their teacher mrs. aave, they're misusing it because there are certain inherent grammatical features that can be observed and anything else would sound weird / not make any sense.

I think you guys just don't know what prescriptivism is!

no, i do. you're just insisting on a weirdly narrow, extreme and absolute definition of the term that doesn't correspond to the way many people actually understand language.

hey iatee - speaking of prescriptivism, what's up re codecademy? O:)

way behind but I am gonna do like 2 weeks worth tomorrow

so you are against narrow and absolute definitions of things, contenderizer

hmmmm

hmmmmm

people who are 'misusing african-american vernacular english' aren't misusing it because they are breaking the rules taught to them by their teacher mrs. aave, they're misusing it because there are certain inherent grammatical features that can be observed and anything else would sound weird / not make any sense.

lol "inherent grammatical features" are in fact prescriptive, you want to frame this dialogue as political because that gets you excited but it's not actually a political/sociological q no matter how bad partisans on either side of the question want it to be. it is tiresome in the extreme to attempt to discuss pleasant linguistic functions when people keep talking about ~consequences~, which are always & everywhere relative to multiple other contexts and are pretty heavily red-herring territory insofar as functions of grammar are concerned

hey look it's another person who doesn't understand what the word means

I know you think that, and that claiming it repeatedly makes you right; it doesn't. you are misusing the word and don't seem to get what it actually means.

"hey look it's another person who disagrees with iatee! as is always the case, this person disagreeing with iatee must be misinformed about some facts"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription plz read

it is weird how often people who disagree with me are misinformed about facts!!

ps read this one after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics

lol the absolute best part about your participation in this thread is that you are ostensibly coming down on the side against pedantry. I don't need to read the wiki on this - I graduated w/honors in the subject

heavy lols at "check Wikipedia, it agrees with me" tho, good show old boy

that's the magic of language change I guess, back when you graduated the word actually meant something different than what it means today

people who are 'misusing african-american vernacular english' aren't misusing it because they are breaking the rules taught to them by their teacher mrs. aave, they're misusing it because there are certain inherent grammatical features that can be observed and anything else would sound weird / not make any sense.

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 8:37 PM (14 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah, but if after documenting the vernacular, we decided to teach it to everybody, we'd have to do that in a fairly prescriptive fashion. this is chicken and egg, neither prescriptivism or descriptivism can meaningfully exist without the other - at least not in modern language education.

and that wiki definition of prescriptivism doesn't agree w you. it doesn't define prescriptivism as some inflexible, morally self-righteous resistance to all changes in language.

I think you guys just don't know what prescriptivism is!

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:35 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm saying that when someone is writing in an arena that would suggest that this person should know how to use "beg the question", then that usage is academically wrong. no one uses it the "wrong" way intentionally

contenderizer otm, not that it'll help him here

so you are against narrow and absolute definitions of things, contenderizer

hmmmm

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 8:39 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

uh, yeah. i have a special prejudice against narrow-minded absolutism when it's factually incorrect and counterproductive.

In linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct. Its aims may be to establish a standard language, to teach what is perceived within a particular society to be correct forms of language, or to advise on effective communication.

hey look it's another person who doesn't understand what the word means

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:48 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're being kind of prescriptivist about this

i love all of you participants (mostly), but this is one of the more boring arguments i've seen on ilx. and i care about the subject matter!

normative practices. judgments. 'what is perceived within a partiular society to be correct'

you are quoting wikipedia

do you know how that looks

it's like citing an ilx thread as a source

normative practices. judgments. 'what is perceived within a partiular society to be correct'

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 8:59 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah, but none of that has to be anywhere near as inflexible, intolerant and self-righteousness as you (ironically) insist.

if you want I can go to any linguistics website in the world and it will have the same definition, because that is the standard linguistic definition of the term. I'm actually not being prescriptive about this, as this is how the term is actually used in linguistics.

uh, "self-righteous"

I can accept that the term might mean other things in other contexts btw, and that is why you are all so confused

lol

if you want I can go to any linguistics website in the world and it will have the same definition, because that is the standard linguistic definition of the term. I'm actually not being prescriptive about this, as this is how the term is actually used in linguistics.

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:01 PM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah, but i don't read that definition in anywhere near the way that you do. and i'm not unfamiliar with the term. prescriptivism is concerned with rules and "correct usage", yes, but that doesn't mean that it can't be adaptive, flexible, and humble about the limits of the rules in question.

that's not the basic connotation of the term. if you wanna be a 'free-thinking radical prescriptivist' be my guest, but that is just not how people use the term

again, maybe in the discussions you have w/ other people who are wrong, the term can mean differente things. as a descriptivist I accept this as a possibility.

different

I'm typing on a small keyboard not making radical spelling errors to prove a point

ok fine let me just

if you want I can go to any linguistics philosophy website in the world and it will have the same definition, because that is the standard linguistic philosophical definition of the term. I'm actually not being prescriptive 'begging the question' erm, prescriptive about this, as this is how the term is actually used in linguistics philosophy.

countdown to "yeah, but"

here aero, it's a college intro to linguistics lesson, sorry wikipedia wasn't good enuf

http://faculty.washington.edu/lauramcg/courses/ling200/ppt/lect2_intro2.pdf

lol if you can't differentiate between how that explains prescriptive vs. descriptive & your earlier c/p then you should just give up on reading entirely

no no, please find a definition on a linguistics site that fits with your quote 'inherent grammatical features are in fact prescriptive'

I mean you graduated w/ honors in this right, maybe look at your alma mater's site, they must have some weird stuff

if you want I can go to any linguistics website in the world and it will have the same definition

perhaps you mean something different by "the same" though idk it's all relative

again, you've just cited another bland, evenhanded definition of prescriptivism, one that doesn't in any way support your suggestion that prescriptivism must be inflexible, self-righteous, hostile to change, etc.

and if you really think this is not a political subject - and you are not on the conservative side of it - I don't know what to tell you. a significant % of the country grows up speaking a different dialect of english than the one we teach in schools, and we make very little effort to address that. or when we do:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/14/us/oakland-scratches-plan-to-teach-black-english.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

I do think that intro to linguistics slideshow supports what he was saying here:

prescriptivists and descriptivists both agree that 'I iatee am' is an incorrect sentence. only prescriptivists think 'yeah that's something I have a lot of' is an incorrect sentence.

and that is a little different from how I was understanding "prescriptive"/"descriptive". (To be honest, I was extrapolating to some extent from how I would use those terms in regards to musical notation.)

there are political aspects to this question for sure - they're not the hamfisted "prescriptivism is conservative! descriptivism isn't!" grade school shit you seem incapable of looking beyond. I'm quite confident you can find a bunch of assholes who favor a prescriptive model but that says exactly nothing about the model or its merits. given that you're generally a more sophisticated political thinker than I it's a weird & uncomfortable role-shift here because you seriously sound like a person who just found out about this question tonight and have decided you have to ~take a side,~ which is lol tbqf

i'm not really down with abandoning the original meaning bcz 'beg the question' in its original sense is a useful phrase for a useful concept that no other phrase will effectively convey, whereas 'beg the question' in its misused sense is just another way of saying something that we already have a perfectly good phrase for.

that said i don't think i've ever bothered correcting anyone because it's hard as fuck to explain to ppl what 'beg the question' actually means.

like, the notion that prescriptive models of grammar rule out dialect or the teaching thereof is something only somebody who didn't understand the term could think. admittedly, that'll include school boards sometimes. surprise! people get elected to school boards who don't actually understand school curriculum. shocking news!

again, there is no 'prescriptive model' - there's a fairly irrational set of vaue judgments and beliefs about rules from above.

and there is no 'descriptive model' there is just 'linguistics'

value judgments

I still see the value to this though (from iatee's Wiki link):

The main aims of linguistic prescription are to define standardized language forms either generally (what is Standard English?) or for specific purposes (what style and register is appropriate in, for example, a legal brief?) and to formulate these in such a way as to make them easily taught or learned.

yeah iatee you're wrong and don't understand and there's no point arguing w/you, g'night

I wanna see that diploma

mr linguist

anyway re contenderizer:
http://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1991/ling.html

that's just a means of including descriptive concepts and theory (taught prescriptively, as in "this is what happened and you need to understand it correctly") with traditional prescriptive language instruction.

again as I said upthread, there are v. good reasons to have standard dialects and forms of writing, the problem is the attitude that comes w/ the prescriptive ideology

which privileges certain forms of language without putting that privilege in context

again, there is no 'prescriptive model' - there's a fairly irrational set of vaue judgments and beliefs about rules from above.

no, that's completely incorrect. the prescriptive model, in short, is this:

1) languages have concrete rules and definitions that can be taught
2) when taught these things, students can learn to use language effectively

it doesn't necessarily depend on value judgments or rules from above (though some certainly treat it that way). at its best, prescriptivism is simply a pedagogical approach.

i mean, a prescriptive pedagogy could easily incorporate a variety of dialects and the idea that languages change with use, but that wouldn't necessarily make it any less prescriptive.

languages do have concrete rules and definitions that can be taught, linguists just make sure to separate the ones that are inherent to the language and its grammar from the ones that have been invented and/or are archaic, whereas prescriptivists do not, basically by definition

(if they did, we wouldn't need the term)

again, disagree. you're employing a strangely and aggressively pejorative definition of the word "prescriptive". linguists who are strongly biased against prescriptivism may commonly use the word in this sense, but that doesn't make such usage universally correct. it isn't. the word doesn't mean what you suggest in most contexts. prescriptive approaches to language education don't need to be anywhere near as rigid or linguistically ignorant as you suggest.

no u see the way linguists use the term is ~what the term means in the linguistic context~ and that is all I am talking about, if you would like to interpret the term I am using w/ another definition in mind, despite the fact that I have repeatedly given you the definition I am using, feel free to continue doing so, I dunno what you think you can get out of changing the defintion of words in my sentences, but go 4 it

linguists just make sure to separate the ones that are inherent to the language and its grammar from the ones that have been invented and/or are archaic, whereas prescriptivists do not, basically by definition

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 10:21 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

that may be true of certain people, but it certainly isn't true of everyone with a more-or-less prescriptive approach to language education. you seem not even to be considering the relationship of prescriptivism to pedagogy.

no u see the way linguists use the term is ~what the term means in the linguistic context~ and that is all I am talking about, if you would like to interpret the term I am using w/ another definition in mind, despite the fact that I have repeatedly given you the definition I am using, feel free to continue doing so, I dunno what you think you can get out of changing the defintion of words in my sentences, but go 4 it

my point is that prescriptivism has real value. your definition of the term reduces it to a caricature of itself that has no value in any context. i don't deny that as a theoretical approach to language, prescriptivism is p much useless. but you seem weirdly unwilling to accept that when it comes to language education, prescriptivism is hugely useful.

when it comes to language education, a form of prescriptivism is the only way to teach a standard dialect or form of writing. no doubt. but that's all it is, a tool. when it's turned into a belief system - and for anyone who believes that 'begs the question' only has one meaning - does follow a belief system of sorts, you are stirring up social and cultural issues. most people follow the prescriptivist ideology to a certain degree because most people don't really think about linguistics. but it doesn't need to be an ideology and doesn't benefit anybody when it is one.

and for anyone = and anyone

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/conan-2.jpg

the funny thing about the 'begs the question' type pedants is that they aren't even pedants, they're people who think they are pedants but are actually fundamentally wrong about language.

but I guess that's enough arguing w/ english majors for one night

(dusts off jacket)

when it's turned into a belief system - and for anyone who believes that 'begs the question' only has one meaning - does follow a belief system of sorts, you are stirring up social and cultural issues.

see, this is where i disagree, and where i think your weird absolutism about the presumed philosophical underpinnings of prescriptivism lead you astray. personally, i think that it's useful to insist on a single "correct" definition of the phrase "beg the question". i believe that an obstinate sort of intransigence about things like this can accomplish some real good (or what i consider good, anyway). there is no assumption in my prescriptivist stance, however, that the rules governing language "descend from on high" or possess some absolute quality of truth and goodness. it's simply a sort of preference, a pragmatically-motivated inclination to protect that which i view as valuable.

christ this thread went full ilx huh

Nobody pushing for the 'correct' usage of 'begs the question' has explained why it ought to be used in light of its being a very counterintuitive and unclear phrase (think aero made one slight ref, tbf)

so the people that are using it to mean something other than its definition in the context of logical fallacies ... why are they using that term? To sound smarter? Because "begs" has fewer syllables than "raises"?

"Raises" = elephant in the room

"Begs" = elephant in the room blowing trumpet noises and wants a bun

beg the beguine

so the people that are using it to mean something other than its definition in the context of logical fallacies ... why are they using that term? To sound smarter? Because "begs" has fewer syllables than "raises"?

― sarahell, Friday, March 2, 2012 4:19 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I mean this is the thing, literally no one intentionally misuses the phrase on some hardcore descriptivist warrior shit, they just don't know the difference. then they're told and they don't do it anymore.

i mean ok i guess captain lorax purposefully says "should of", props to him

i just want to be clear, i dont correct people about this because i believe its "right," i correct people about this because social interaction is a game and its important to always demonstrate your superiority to the other players

oh yeah totally I think that is acceptable in theory

but I think as far as the game goes this particular phrase has been so completely transformed in its common usage that you are more likely to 'lose the game / look like an asshole without scoring any points'.

do you guys prefer commas "inside quotes," like that or "outside quotes", like that? because the historically correct way is inside, but from a aesthetic purity POV, outside is much better, and using "beg the question" like "raise the question" is also much better in the same way.

also much better aesthetically: the phrase "soup to nuts" visualized as a bowl of gazpacho piled high with cashews rather than some shitty gun.

punctuation goes inside the quotes if it's part of what you're quoting, outside if it's not.

there's no historically correct way, as british people and american people have different systems for commas in/outside quotes. and aesthetically I would disagree, I think they look better inside quotes. again, everything is relativist, there is no truth, nothing matters, etc. etc.

but everyone who disagrees w/ me is a republican

w/ what is this? Plato does not mention it.

again, everything is relativist, there is no truth, nothing matters, etc. etc.

― iatee, Friday, March 2, 2012 10:31 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is why we fight so hard for what we believe to be true, btw

ya I guess if finding 'truth' in arbitrary social practices gives yr life meaning go for it, again like I said it's mostly a religious thing

the truth is found in the struggle, to crush yr enemies, hear the lamentation of their womenfolk, get them to renege on their previously held positions on grammatical minutiaie

does anyone say "bags the question" yet?

I hope to god not

i think it would make sense in terms of language evolution

blogs the question

relativism doesn't invalidate the idea that certain language practices take less of a cognitive load on its speakers the same way relativism doesn't invalidate the water-saving efficiencies of modern flush toilets. You can still value period toiletry fixtures more just like you can value the ancestral creep of "begging the question" but it's gonna be tough to argue against modern toiletry when people want modern toilets.

bogs the question.

illegal question in begging area

After we have decided this question for good and all, I suspect the fine, upstanding mass of people will just go ahead and use the phrase "begs the question" in any way that suits their purposes.

it suits my purposes to interpret "that begs the question" to mean "that gives me an intensely embarrassing orgasm"

Then the phrase will come in handy quite often for you, I am sure.

anything that requires people to use language in a way that's not natural to them is going to take 'more of a cognitive load', which is why the prescriptivists always lose. in your example, the 'historically correct usage' compares better to 'historically correct toilets'

xp to phil

but what determines what is natural?

ya I guess if finding 'truth' in arbitrary social practices gives yr life meaning go for it, again like I said it's mostly a religious thing

uh yeah, again, it's not so much a matter of 'truth' as one of simple preference. i prefer not to drown bags of excess kittens in the crick, though some might see this as an appropriate disposal method. of course, there's no absolute right or wrong either way (it's all 'religion' as i suppose you'd have it). nevertheless, i have my ways.

same goes for lots of other essentially 'religious' disputes; e.g. civil rights & other merely moral trivialities. do i agitate for the passage of laws to protect nearly-obsolete usage? no, because relative to shit like civil rights and even soggy kittens, usage really is a trivial matter, a question of aesthetics more than one of 'religion' or even morality. that triviality shouldn't prevent us from expressing a preference...

right, you get to expres your preference, and the rest of society gets to express their preference, and in this case the majority of society has expressed another preference, which makes you at least contextually wrong

by this logic, agitators for women's suffrage and civil rights activists were contextually wrong

iatee: what, your taste in usage is different than mine? that means you're a religiously motivated conservative who believes that the rules of language are a form of Truth that descend from on high. i sneer in your general direction.

me: uh, no, i just have certain preferences regarding language, about 50-50 utilitarian vs. aesthetic

repeat until everyone else leaves the room

in this case the majority of society has expressed another preference, which makes you at least contextually wrong

who gives a shit about that? relative to society as a whole, i'm "contextually wrong" about almost everything. whoop-de-doo.

dan that's a good comparison because it points out that this is not about language it's about people attaching weird moral beliefs to language

bag the kittens and the question and throw em in the crick

Is wanting to be understood a weird moral belief?

but what determines what is natural?

As iatee could no doubt tell you, almost every imaginable method of forming a language and a grammar has been adopted, so what is 'natural' as a way to express a meaning has no rules that are not contextual.

Come to think, this debate about descriptivist and prescriptivist grammar has a lot of similarity to the nature/nurture debate. No language can operate without rules. But every language is a living thing and living things grow and change their shape. Because the 'shape' of a language is a function of its rules, this means the rules of any language continually change.

Both aspects are entirely true and neither one is more true than the other.

no, I've said like 200 times by now, having certain standardized usage guidelines is v useful. but when you're fighting for a definition of something that actually goes against the definition used by the majority of speakers, you are not fighting to be understood. you are either fighting a mini-political battle because you believe there is some moral value to language not evolving or you just want to score social points.

xp to dan

i kinda feel like this is a bit reductive though. People use language differently in different contexts. Words/phrases have different meanings/connotations in different contexts. In certain contexts that "begs the question" usage would be considered wrong, such as a logic/philosophy class.

yes I agree w/ that

if i'm hanging out at a bar with some people and someone uses it to mean "raises the question" and everyone understands that that's what that person means, then I don't think it's a wrong usage, because in that context, the rules of language are less stringent and it's more about the function of communication

yup

dan that's a good comparison because it points out that this is not about language it's about people attaching weird moral beliefs to language

gah, you're the only one here who sees any component of "morality" in this. no one is using a moral justification for prescriptivist stances, but you seem to feel that you can defeat all opposition by sneering at the "weirdness" of linguistic morality. morality aside, people attach feelings (for instance, likes and dislikes) to all sorts of things. there is nothing "weird" about this at any level, even when people disagree about what's best.

i think crude, sprawling mcmansions are grotesque and horrible, blights on the human environment that appeal only to the most stunted hearts and minds. i'll fulminate about this at length, likely borrowing the language of stern moral opprobrium, but deep down, i don't really believe that there's anything truly WRONG with gross houses and the idiots that love them. it's simply a matter of taste (or the lack thereof). the conflation of taste and morality is, as others have pointed out, a sort of game, a way of adding spice to mere aesthetic disagreement. like lex on comedy and/or indie rock.

that's not to say that i might think less of that person, in the sense of "that guy isn't as smart as he thinks he is" for using that term in that way. it would probably depend on what he's arguing and how much both of us have had to drink tbh

so you are a relativist at heart who also believes this is just a game. okay I think we're good.

if i'm hanging out at a bar with some people and someone uses it to mean "raises the question" and everyone understands that that's what that person means, then I don't think it's a wrong usage, because in that context, the rules of language are less stringent and it's more about the function of communication

i see no reason to stand that far above the fray. if i'm with a group of people who think that the name of the porn mag oui is pronounced "ooo-whee" because that's how everyone says it where they're from (a conversation i actually had once upon a time in summer camp), then i see no reason to placidly accept that their usage is "contextually correct". fuck that. they're redneck idiots and i'm right. it's a french word meaning "yes". it's pronounced "whee".

all examples in linguistic debates should refer back to the names of "porn mags", imo.

lol great example

this is probably covered in the croissant thread, but was the british pronunciation of "kwa'-sahn" actually correct in French? isn't there some stress reversal?

I dunno how british people do it but in french it's the final syllable that's stressed

ooo-whée!

i kinda feel like this is a bit reductive though. People use language differently in different contexts. Words/phrases have different meanings/connotations in different contexts. In certain contexts that "begs the question" usage would be considered wrong, such as a logic/philosophy class.

― sarahell, Friday, March 2, 2012 2:27 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes I agree w/ that

― iatee, Friday, March 2, 2012 2:28 PM (18 minutes ago)

what about an english class?

english classes can and should explain when words have multiple meanings dependent on context

what about an english class?

^^ take this provacateur out and shoot him!

the "contextually correct" argument hardly seems to prize any one definition over another. let's say i'm a member of a group that thinks "begging the question" refers to a particular logical fallacy. within my culture, even if we're a small group, that definition is contextually correct. and let's say i meet a member of another group, on to whom the phrase means to raise a question. within this other person's culture, that definition is correct. since this person and i don't share a cultural context that defines the term, it has no single "correct" definition in the social space we create in relation to one another. we have to sort it out on our own. this is part of how language evolves, even if it leads to disagreement, and there's nothing wrong with it, nothing wrong with either side's insistence that they're right.

i agree with that

i assume you are talking of an informal context where something outside the individuals in question is determining the right/wrong.

crap, something outside the individuals in question is _not_ determining the right/wrong.

i think one group can make a legitimate claim to larger cultural primacy, but the minority group can make a prescriptivist appeal, which the larger group can accept if there are reasonable grounds for it -- like say for the disjunction between "fonts" and "typefaces", but I'm not sure what kind of convincing grounds you can lay for "begging the question" in its historical meaning.

it's a technical term. The issue is whether a technical term is required to mean the same thing when used outside of that context.

there is no 'required'

english classes can and should explain when words have multiple meanings dependent on context

― iatee, Friday, March 2, 2012 2:49 PM (11 minutes ago)

sure but should this be encouraged in this setting? should the teacher/professor just let it slide? or should she say something like "this if often used to mean [x], but to be more precise we might want to use [y]." i think it depends on the circumstance tbh - using "begs the question" like many people use it is certainly not acceptable in the academy. in its case i don't think the cat is SO far out of the bag that it's not worth enforcing in an academic setting

there is no 'more precise', or rather 'more precise' is a value judgment. there are just different contexts. teachers should do their best to explain the contexts.

that is the path to grade inflation

this academy sucks, should use a better term

"Under this student's context, it is perfectly correct for him to assume the Battle of Hastings referred to a pivotal football game between two rival schools in Hastings, NE. A"

teaching history as a field of nuance and context and not just a list of dates and historical events is as important as teaching language as something w/ nuance and context. we do a better job at the first, tho, most hs students are prob aware that history is something w/ interpretations.

when i taught english, my students often misused words, or used bizarre idioms, or made sentence structure level syntactical errors, and i corrected them with a red pen and sometimes even lowered their grade if there were too many examples of that in a given paper. clearly i am part of the religious-prescriptive problem.

i didn't even tell them "there are no correct ways to write, but i am teaching you a particular model of standard written 'white' english.' i actually told them: 'i am teaching you how to write correctly. you do not yet know how to do that."

It's a gradient. You were not teaching them "how to write correctly", so much as teaching them how to improve their writing from chaotic near-nonsense to something another human might be able to decipher. Once they reach that level, then there are many, many levels above that to which they might aspire.

i made stylistic corrections as well. for example, when i taught juniors and seniors i corrected the use of passive verbs, particularly 'to be' and 'to have.'

I presume you told them the purpose of these corrections, and why your substitutions were preferable to the constructions they used, even though those constructions were, strictly speaking, correct.

yes. i told them that good writing avoids the use of passive verbs and that i was teaching them how to write well. another terrible thing i did: when i taught shakespeare, i taught them what the words of the play meant when shakespeare wrote it. i did not make up my own interpretations of his phrases + idioms based on what i thought the words meant in 2011.

yeah I don't think you get it, cause that's 'the point', everything has its context

teaching students using this methodology is far more difficult and time consuming than letting them make up whatever they want and write however they want. if only i had abandoned my bitter clinging to the religion of prescriptivism...

descriptive linguistics is not 'everyone gets to make up personal definitions of words and grammar doesn't exist'

i am sure i don't understand being as how i am blinded by my allegiance to my deity: SHRUNKANDWHITE. all praise.

strunkr whites

I hope the churls were grateful, Mordy.

they mostly complained. heathens.

Clearly, letting them make up whatever they want and write however they want does not require a teacher, as it requires no learning. Such freedom comes as easily and naturally as pissing in a nappy. Heathens.

would love to read yr 'corrected' ulysses mordy.

why would i correct ulysses? joyce knew what he was doing.

xp
I'm pretty sure Joyce had already passed muster as to his ability at "correct" writing, even unto the highest level, before he wrote Ulysses. This exempts him from Mordy's red pen.

dubliners + portrait both pretty fucking excellent

B+ at least

damn, it's like that languagelog link covered the topic so comprehensively we had to make up a new fight to have.

but fuk the abuse of "begging the question" anyway, the reverse situation, where philosophers take perfectly clear common usages and pervert them, pisses me off way more. Case in point: the way the bastards took "just in case" and said "oh no, it no longer means 'as a precaution', it means 'if and only if'."

So now one formerly clear phrase is confusing and opaque, to replace a phrase that was already perfectly clear (and which could be puzzled out from context if you hadn't encountered it before).

They can put up with "begging the question" being misused as punishment, imo.

a powerful ally!

(ban them all pls, just in case)

to pick up, anyway-

Joyce is allowed misuse grammar etc as he's proven that it's intentional on his part, if i've read yis rightly gents.

rather begs the question, imo, whether you'd propose a system of easily-demonstrated grammatical excellence before you'd deign to correct the usage in question or not?

we're beyond pedantry into sheer snobbery tbh

ILX satori, then

Joyce is allowed misuse grammar etc as he's proven that it's intentional on his part, if i've read yis rightly gents.

gonna give u a kinda srs answer here. i don't know how much joyce you've read, but he does not misuse grammar, or certainly does not misuse it like someone without his familiarity with the language. i think if you compare ulysses (or even the more syntactical troublesome finnegan's wake) to an 8th grader's writing, it is immediately clear that they aren't misusing grammar in similar ways. it is not just that joyce had published technically proficient works that previously demonstrated his expertise in english. even the works that bent the language did so in startling and revelatory ways. maybe this is snobby, but i think most fields have this phenomenon - whether it's cuisine, wine, visual arts, film, music -- we recognize the difference between shifting the idiom in intentional, unconventional ways, and amateurism that doesn't even grasp the form.

do you think a rapper who couldn't write a masterful essay in standard american english would be capable of creating a masterful work of art in english

obviously not. but instead of trying to rhetorically trick me into helping you make some point, how about you just make your point and we'll see if it has anything to do with what i said?

(obviously i think he could, i mean.)

part of what i tried to impress on my students is to use precision in language and to say what they mean. you're asking me about a rapper who can't write a masterful essay because, i assume, you are trying to make the point that 'english' isn't just a monolithic body, but actually encompasses a number of dialects + regional variations throughout the world, and that 'writing' is also a catchall term that could mean anything from a formal essay to the lyrics of a hip-hop song. i'll grant all those notions without withdrawing anything i wrote previously.

easily-demonstrated grammatical excellence

Proficiency may be easy, but excellence is never easy, no matter what the endeavor.

Even if one were to demonstrate grammatical excellence by means of a sentence where a great many grammatical elements are present that are difficult to control, such as dependent clauses and subjunctive mood, and were you to show this sentence to a student who was not accustomed to the use of such gramatical elements, pointing out each of its constituent parts, naming them and explaining their use, it is doubtful whether such a demonstration would have any immediate effect, apart from a slack-jawed look on the part of said student. This is because a simple demonstration of a complex interelationship is not an easy one, and any approach to its understanding requires a large number of intermediate steps. See?

applause, but how long did you work on that?

8 or 10 minutes

that was pretty great, A

Proofreading it now, I've caught two errors at least. So, the moral is that I need more than 8 or 10 minutes for this shit.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

well, clear winner there.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html

i don't believe that it matters whether a sentence ends with a preposition or not, but it still looks wrong and I avoid doing it whenever I can.

Sometimes, in normal speech, a preposition falls naturally at the end of a sentence. If it sounds reasonable when spoken aloud, there's no reason to change it.

I'm only talking about in print. I take an anything goes attitude towards speech and will pronounce Eagles as Iggles, water as wooder, and end whatever I want with a preposition.

well eagles is pronounced iggles

Putting a preposition at the end of a sentence is bad because it breaks the rule about not putting a preposition at the end of a sentence? idgi

well it's a rule for a reason iirc

it's not a rule!

but the reason is that some old white dudes really, really liked latin and decided to get mad whenever english was doing something that you can't do in latin

just out of curiosity, why can't you do it in latin?

objects follow prepositions in latin ('pre' 'position') so there's not a way for a preposition to end a sentence

you mean just as a rule. okay, but whyfore such a rule? what does/did it serve?

well word order matters in latin in a way that it doesn't in english, my gf is kicking me off the computer, you gonna have to google it

yeah, i'm just being a pest anyway, implying that all linguistic rules are p much arbitrary, no matter how fundamental to the language in question.

Prepositions turn up at the end of sentences in English because of phrasal verbs like, oh, "turn up", which Latin doesn't have. It has a lot of compound verbs with a prepositional prefix instead, but they're all one word, so you can't split the components and shuffle them round the sentence. Same as you can't split an infinitive in Latin because it's all one word.

Latin is fairly lax about sentence order but it keeps its prepositions before their objects, and formal written/oratory Latin (which is, after all, most of what we have to go by) is a bit fussy about not ending your sentence on a "weak" word/syllable iirc - they consider verbs good style to put at the end, enclitic suffixes a really horrible way to end a sentence, etc.

etc.

Yes, that would probably be a really horrible way to end a sentence! Or, that "etc." is there to mean "and all the other things I've forgotten in the 15 years since I knew this stuff"

etc, iirc, fyi fwiw.

A primary school english teacher, after an exhausting day trying to teach her students how you should never end a sentence with a preposition, took a book about Australia up to read to her 6 year old daughter before her bed. The daughter, upon seeing the book, said "Mommy, what did you bring that book that I didn't want to be read to from about Down Under up for?"

homemade jokes?

if only i were that hilarious

Best thing you will ever read on this subject:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290🕸

https://i.imgur.com/jQlPz8h.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhPFLK3e7fY

that book that I didn't want to be read to from about Down Under up for?

This is what being an intensely dedicated descriptivist grammarian does to your brain. And I say, bravo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urhJ81E-Bog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSH8OdHx2A

It reminds me a bit of the similarly pedantic arguments over "decimate." Just like few people ever need to use "beg the question" in its proper meaning, nobody at all ever needs a word to describe destroying 1/10th of anything. Of course, we can just say "raise the question" and "devastate" and be done with the whole discussion.

i don't really understand what beg the question actually means, but it's a shame imo that "disinterested" and "enormity" now mean more generic things than they used to, and iiuc this has happened to beg the question, so i guess i can see why someone would care. not a huge fan of people who care about logical fallacies though. look at this bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies.

a) people should probably understand what the things they say actually mean
b) they don't, and now those things have, for better or mostly worse, a new meaning

words and phrases change their meaning over time. if most people understand a phrase to mean A, then it means A.

the language log article says all that needs to be said about this though.

“Enormity” is the one I care about but also seems to be a lost cause.

wow, this thread. classic ILX argument in that reading it through was unbearably tedious, and yet taught me several interesting things to ponder.

I started this thread because about 10 years prior, a philosophy 101 instructor had told us that "you know that phrase to beg the question? everybody uses it wrong and it actually means..." I had never heard that phrase before and in the intervening time, only heard it by people who were supposedly using it wrong and by people who were very upset that people were using it wrong. I still have never caught a wild example of it as it is supposed to be used.

if most people understand a phrase to mean A, then it means A.

not if you're in the 'not-most' group of people who understand it to mean B, though. So you have words that mean different things to different people, and so clarification is more important.

You need to know enough about ^what other people understand^ to be able to even know to ask for clarification! This is difficult for many people!

Good point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8IPjU5Gjy0

not if you're in the 'not-most' group of people who understand it to mean B, though. So you have words that mean different things to different people, and so clarification is more important.

You need to know enough about ^what other people understand^ to be able to even know to ask for clarification! This is difficult for many people!

"Nonplussed" is in this state at the moment: divides between meaning confused and unimpressed.

I tend to solve all this by looking down at my shirt.

When I am wearing work clothes, I am probably at work, and therefore I should observe the standards set by my industry and my employer and the hegemonic society they are a part of. So I choose non-controversial usage, avoid potential confusion, and stay away from shibboleths/bugbears/hobgoblins like "beg the question."

I might end a sentence with a preposition if doing so is the cleanest way to say something. I might split an infinitive if doing so is the cleanest way to say something. But mostly I observe a fairly formal register and follow the "rules" as set forth in style guides and usage manuals. As a professional word-user, this is how I keep getting paid. For me it's not about deferring to Strunk or White or Fowler or whomsoever - I have an audience of one, and that one audience member is the person who approves my timesheet and/or signs my paycheck.

If I'm off duty - in a bar, chilling with homies, or on the civilian internet - I don't care so much. I probably won't use "beg the question" myself, but I won't be annoyed if someone else does. Nor will I correct a layperson in a laic context.

YMP’s Guide to Formal and Informal Usage

if most people understand a phrase to mean A, then it means A.

that can be problematic if it's one of those words like "gaslighting" which describe legitimate abusive behavior, but has become weaponized by a growing number of people to mean "you disagree with me on this topic that is very important to me"

I get annoyed whenever my mother or boss's boss will say something purely coincidental is "ironic", but not enough to correct anybody because who really cares.

did meet someone once who thought "pet peeve" meant something she liked, which made for an awkward convo.

the gaslighting thing is part of a much broader recuperation of radical and radical-adjacent language which feels like a whole different issue from people not understanding the concept or using it wrong according to a convention. I don't think the people who use free speech to mean fascism are mistaken about what free speech means on linguistic grounds, they're just trying to do a thing

So you have words that mean different things to different people, and so clarification is more important.

Not always.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Types_of_Ambiguity

Actually

#notallambiguity

I continue to wish he'd titled the book A Bunch of Types of Ambiguity.

Two or Three Things I Know About Ambiguity.