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

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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.