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Does it drive anyone else crazy when they see "begs the question" used improperly?
by jobeirne 18y ago
Does it drive anyone else crazy when they see "begs the question" used improperly?
- crescendo 18y agoYes, but that's just the way languages progress. Eventually what's wrong will be right, and what's right will be archaic.
- pg 18y agoNot always. I predict this will be one of those mistakes that stays a mistake.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y agoPlease explain. I'd rather use it correctly if I can...
- crescendo 18y agoThe proper use of "begs the question" is as the name of a logical fallacy where the conclusion of an argument appears as one of its premises. Kinda like a circular argument. It's rarely used this way outside of philosophy and logic contexts. Most people nowadays use it to mean something like, "raises the question," which traditionally is incorrect. edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
- dreish 18y agoAsk a dinosaur, appropriately enough: http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000693.html http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000693.html
- aston 18y agoI'm trying to seed a replacement phrase, "beckons the question," so that we get to keep around the cool archaic sense of "beg."
- ksvs 18y agoWhile annoying, it is a useful data point about the writer, like misspellings used to be before spell-checkers became so common.
- etal 18y agoNot when the context of the mistake comes pretty close to the actual meaning of begging the question: IE 8 is fat. Period. All of which begs the question: What were these people thinking? Then it's just amusing. (Rephrased: Since web browsers should not require large amounts of memory, IE8 fails because it requires large amounts of memory.)