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A noble effort, but "begging the question" is destined to go the way of split infinitives....
by mcknz 16y ago
A noble effort, but "begging the question" is destined to go the way of split infinitives....
- lmkg 16y agoI agree with what you meant to say, but in truth, split infinitives are historically good and proper English. It was a prescriptive desire to make English more like Latin that led to the taboo against split infinitives (and ending sentences with prepositions), which is about as counter-idiomatic as formating Lisp parens according to K&R.
- mcknz 16y ago[1] http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14636 http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14636 Then I suppose the complaint against split infinitives is really just an attempt to prescribe against awkward phrasing. Those crazy Victorians.
- jeromec 16y agoYou may be right that it will become accepted. I saw this thread on HN, then minutes later while browsing Internet stories came across an article today about anti-Kremlin rallies: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67U4YJ20100831 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67U4YJ20100831 Excerpt: "There are hundreds of police and to us it looks disproportionate," Thijs Berman, a Dutch member of the European Parliament's human rights subcommittee, said at Triumph Square just before the rally. "It begs the question: what is such a big country as Russia afraid of?"