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Once a public impassioned plea like this shows up, you know the battle has long since been lost. Sure, we'll convince everyone to stop using "begs the question"

Once a public impassioned plea like this shows up, you know the battle has long since been lost. Sure, we'll convince everyone to stop using "begs the question" incorrectly...right after we convince them to stop using "decimated" as a synonym for "devastated," and "comprised of" instead of "composed of," and...

philwelch 6y ago
At some point I think we managed to either save the word "ironic" or at least intimidate uneducated people into not using it anymore.
- yunruse 6y ago
  It’s like ten thousand descriptivists, when all you need is a prescriptivist… I think words like “ironic” and “literal” have a lot of staying power, even if they have seceded a little ground on informal use. There will always need to be a case when it’s important to disambiguate how ironic one is being. Irony is often made clear by over-exaggeration or stock phrases (eg “/s”, eye dialect “you guise”), but sincerity can be made unambiguously clear with a term such as “unironic”, which is often avoided in irony to keep things clear Obviously this begs the question of if someone were to use “unironic” ironically, but outside of being used in rare cases of hyper-irony, the only use I can think of this misdirection is to be purposefully malicious. So even without prescriptivism, I believe that irony (at least as made clear in “I was being ironic”) is a word one that is very hard to kill.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    I don't understand why people get upset at people using 'literal' incorrectly.... it is almost always used as a form of hyperbole, which seems like a totally valid linguistic use. If I say "oh man, I literally die every time someone complains about people using literally wrong", I am clearly using hyperbole... no one is being confused, and I am not changing the meaning of a word. Do people think we are going to ruin accurate measurements when I say something like, "this thing weighs a ton!" when the item clearly weighs a lot less than 2000 pounds?
    - waterhouse 6y ago
      I was visiting a friend at college, staying in his room. I once told him that I would be literally sleeping with someone, and he at first didn't realize that this meant I wouldn't be sleeping in his room that night. So the corruption of "literally" has indeed interfered with my communication.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        Huh? Do you mean the corruption of "sleeping with"? Or did you mean "someone else"?
        waterhouse 6y ago
        It's the corruption of "literally" in "literally sleeping with". My friend didn't realize that this meant sleeping in that person's bed with them, until I explained it.
    - rendall 6y ago
      While I agree that it's a valid example of hyperbole, to me, using literally to mean figuratively is the sonic equivalent to writing many exclamation points!!!!!!! You can do it, but it's bad form, and doesn't make the point the speaker wants to make
      - dllthomas 6y ago
        > using literally to mean figuratively I contend that this isn't a thing. It's absolutely the case that "literally" is often used when the sentence is figurative, but for it to mean "figuratively" it would have to be the intent of the speaker that the inclusion of "literally" makes the utterance more likely to be understood as figurative. I think it is instead used as an intensifier. All of that said, I don't have any principled objection to protest against it on stylistic grounds. I just think we should try and be clear about what's going on. (And I recognize that I'm disagreeing, here, with at least one dictionary - I believe they got it wrong.)
  - taneq 6y ago
    > Obviously this begs the question Let me guess, you literally did that unironically? I always thought that the perfect example of irony would be to write a song about irony in which you use a bunch of examples that aren't ironic... but that's just me.
    - jjgreen 6y ago
      Like rain on your wedding day ...
garbagetime 6y ago
There are plenty of communities where 'begging the question' is used correctly. The most obvious are philosophy communities.
furyofantares 6y ago
> stop using "decimated" as a synonym for "devastated" OTOH decimation actually was devastating, the idea that it just means "lose 10% of" really undersells the process of punishing a large group of your army by dividing them into groups of 10 and forcing each group to choose one at random and then the other 9 murder them by stoning.
- taneq 6y ago
  Yeah, having one in 10 of your closest friends/colleagues being killed would be pretty damn devastating under any circumstances, let alone in the manner you describe here.
colmvp 6y ago
Or how literally is used in places where it should be figuratively but we accept literally nonetheless.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  "Literally" is often used when the utterance is figurative, but it is used as an intensifier by way of hyperbole. Saying it should be "figuratively" is incorrect - that would not serve the same role.
throwtheyaway 6y ago
For me it is the use of "they" as a singular pronoun. I learned to read and write in the 1970s and 1980s and misusing "they" in a singular context would result in a red mark on one's paper and a lower grade. Any time I read a sentence that uses "they" as a singular it's a small mental roadblock. It's like stumbling on a displaced brick in a sidewalk. If I read "a good programmer will work to understand the problem they are trying to solve" I will mentally trip over that and be distracted from the point being made. If I don't know whether my subject is a male or a female person, I will use "he" as the singular. "A good programmer will work to understand the problem he is trying to solve." I learned that "he" refers to a male or is neutral, but don't mind when writers use "she" as long as they are consistent about it. In a paragraph about the habits of a good programmer, flipping from "he" to "she" every other sentence is also distracting. Also OK if the writer avoids the issue: "Good programmers will work to understand the problems they are trying to solve." Yes I realize that the usage of "they" has evolved, as language does, but for me it's hard-coded in ROM at this point.
- professoretc 6y ago
  "They" has been used as a singular gender neutral pronoun since at least the 14th century. The modern prohibition against it is just that, modern.
  - dllthomas 6y ago
    At the same time, we're not trying to communicate with any 15th century readers. If it's in fact prevalent that a large number of readers have trouble with a construction, it doesn't really matter how recently that trouble arose, does it?
    - Freak_NL 6y ago
      They'll get used to it. Cheer up! English has it easy in this respect — although I'll readily grant that it is even easier in elliptical languages that usually omit gender specific references altogether, like Japanese. In Dutch it will be an uphill battle to get a singular 'hen/hun' accepted.
ternaryoperator 6y ago
And the use of 'criteria' as if it were a singular
kortilla 6y ago
Don’t forget the people literally murdering the word “literally”.

philwelch 6y ago

At some point I think we managed to either save the word "ironic" or at least intimidate uneducated people into not using it anymore.

yunruse 6y ago
It’s like ten thousand descriptivists, when all you need is a prescriptivist… I think words like “ironic” and “literal” have a lot of staying power, even if they have seceded a little ground on informal use. There will always need to be a case when it’s important to disambiguate how ironic one is being. Irony is often made clear by over-exaggeration or stock phrases (eg “/s”, eye dialect “you guise”), but sincerity can be made unambiguously clear with a term such as “unironic”, which is often avoided in irony to keep things clear Obviously this begs the question of if someone were to use “unironic” ironically, but outside of being used in rare cases of hyper-irony, the only use I can think of this misdirection is to be purposefully malicious. So even without prescriptivism, I believe that irony (at least as made clear in “I was being ironic”) is a word one that is very hard to kill.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  I don't understand why people get upset at people using 'literal' incorrectly.... it is almost always used as a form of hyperbole, which seems like a totally valid linguistic use. If I say "oh man, I literally die every time someone complains about people using literally wrong", I am clearly using hyperbole... no one is being confused, and I am not changing the meaning of a word. Do people think we are going to ruin accurate measurements when I say something like, "this thing weighs a ton!" when the item clearly weighs a lot less than 2000 pounds?
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    I was visiting a friend at college, staying in his room. I once told him that I would be literally sleeping with someone, and he at first didn't realize that this meant I wouldn't be sleeping in his room that night. So the corruption of "literally" has indeed interfered with my communication.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Huh? Do you mean the corruption of "sleeping with"? Or did you mean "someone else"?
      - waterhouse 6y ago
        It's the corruption of "literally" in "literally sleeping with". My friend didn't realize that this meant sleeping in that person's bed with them, until I explained it.
  - rendall 6y ago
    While I agree that it's a valid example of hyperbole, to me, using literally to mean figuratively is the sonic equivalent to writing many exclamation points!!!!!!! You can do it, but it's bad form, and doesn't make the point the speaker wants to make
    - dllthomas 6y ago
      > using literally to mean figuratively I contend that this isn't a thing. It's absolutely the case that "literally" is often used when the sentence is figurative, but for it to mean "figuratively" it would have to be the intent of the speaker that the inclusion of "literally" makes the utterance more likely to be understood as figurative. I think it is instead used as an intensifier. All of that said, I don't have any principled objection to protest against it on stylistic grounds. I just think we should try and be clear about what's going on. (And I recognize that I'm disagreeing, here, with at least one dictionary - I believe they got it wrong.)
- taneq 6y ago
  > Obviously this begs the question Let me guess, you literally did that unironically? I always thought that the perfect example of irony would be to write a song about irony in which you use a bunch of examples that aren't ironic... but that's just me.
  - jjgreen 6y ago
    Like rain on your wedding day ...

garbagetime 6y ago

There are plenty of communities where 'begging the question' is used correctly. The most obvious are philosophy communities.

furyofantares 6y ago

> stop using "decimated" as a synonym for "devastated" OTOH decimation actually was devastating, the idea that it just means "lose 10% of" really undersells the process of punishing a large group of your army by dividing them into groups of 10 and forcing each group to choose one at random and then the other 9 murder them by stoning.

taneq 6y ago
Yeah, having one in 10 of your closest friends/colleagues being killed would be pretty damn devastating under any circumstances, let alone in the manner you describe here.

colmvp 6y ago

Or how literally is used in places where it should be figuratively but we accept literally nonetheless.

dllthomas 6y ago
"Literally" is often used when the utterance is figurative, but it is used as an intensifier by way of hyperbole. Saying it should be "figuratively" is incorrect - that would not serve the same role.

throwtheyaway 6y ago

For me it is the use of "they" as a singular pronoun. I learned to read and write in the 1970s and 1980s and misusing "they" in a singular context would result in a red mark on one's paper and a lower grade. Any time I read a sentence that uses "they" as a singular it's a small mental roadblock. It's like stumbling on a displaced brick in a sidewalk. If I read "a good programmer will work to understand the problem they are trying to solve" I will mentally trip over that and be distracted from the point being made. If I don't know whether my subject is a male or a female person, I will use "he" as the singular. "A good programmer will work to understand the problem he is trying to solve." I learned that "he" refers to a male or is neutral, but don't mind when writers use "she" as long as they are consistent about it. In a paragraph about the habits of a good programmer, flipping from "he" to "she" every other sentence is also distracting. Also OK if the writer avoids the issue: "Good programmers will work to understand the problems they are trying to solve." Yes I realize that the usage of "they" has evolved, as language does, but for me it's hard-coded in ROM at this point.

professoretc 6y ago
"They" has been used as a singular gender neutral pronoun since at least the 14th century. The modern prohibition against it is just that, modern.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  At the same time, we're not trying to communicate with any 15th century readers. If it's in fact prevalent that a large number of readers have trouble with a construction, it doesn't really matter how recently that trouble arose, does it?
  - Freak_NL 6y ago
    They'll get used to it. Cheer up! English has it easy in this respect — although I'll readily grant that it is even easier in elliptical languages that usually omit gender specific references altogether, like Japanese. In Dutch it will be an uphill battle to get a singular 'hen/hun' accepted.

ternaryoperator 6y ago

And the use of 'criteria' as if it were a singular

kortilla 6y ago

Don’t forget the people literally murdering the word “literally”.