Short Saturday: True Confessions of a Reformed Pedant

by | Oct 25, 2015 | Your Editor Says 


Not long ago I wrote a (pedantic) post about two common usage errors that often come up when I am editing. One of them is the phrase begs the question. And yes, the actual meaning is difficult to grasp; I confess I have to sit very still and concentrate very hard. 🙂 (It’s a term for circular logic when you’re doing it wrong.)

But I know what it doesn’t mean, and my job is to make sure you look good in print. So I flag it. And blog about it.

And then I found this! (“‘Begging the question’: we have answers” at Language Log—a collaborative blog on topics of linguistics and language—written by Mark Liberman.) Oh goodness, kids. Go get a cup of coffee. It’s a fabulous #longread, and it starts with this:

There are four related issues here. First, how did “begging the question” come to be a technical term for (a certain kind of) circular reasoning? Second, do people really need a way to talk about circular reasoning, anyway? Third, why did “begging the question” get re-purposed in common usage to mean “dodging the question” or “raising the question”, rather than simply subsiding, along with the rest of the terminology of medieval logic, into the midden heap of obsolete idioms? And fourth, should you go with the flow and use “beg the question” to mean “raise the question”, or should you fight for the traditional usage, or what? I’ll take up these issues one at a time.

And he does.

The best part of it is his conclusion:

What should we do? Should we join the herd and use “beg the question” to mean “raise the question”? Or should we join the few, proud hold-outs who still use it in the old “assume the conclusion” sense, while complaining about the ignorant rabble who etc.?

In my opinion, those are both bad choices. If you use the phrase to mean “raise the question”, some pedants will silently dismiss you as a dunce, while others will complain loudly, thus distracting everyone else from whatever you wanted to say. If you complain about others’ “misuse”, you come across as an annoying pedant. And if you use the phrase to mean “assume the conclusion”, almost no one will understand you.

My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself—use “assume the conclusion” or “raise the question”, depending on what you mean—and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.

I only love this. And if you do, too, you’ll want to have a look at Liberman’s followup, in which he explores the myriad ways the phrase has been “re-lexicalized.” Whoa.

Tweet: More about the phrase begs the question.
Tweet: A great lexicological solution for those who want to be unpedantically right.

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