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Comment by flyingfences | Hacker News Reader

It invites the question.

English is pliable and sometimes a word or phrase becomes what the masses think of it, especially when "journalists, advertisers, and major mass media entities" use it that way. See literally, irregardless

Irregardless, it literally begs the question.

Prescriptivism is bullshit.

I don't really want to get into it, those days are long behind me. But I couldn't help feeling dissatisfied with the content you linked.

  A simple example would be "My favorite author is always right because he says so in his latest book." The proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.

Ok, but... why? It asserts that "begging the question" is misused, asserts a "real" meaning, but doesn't explain it. In what way is a restatement of the premise a form of "begging the question"?

I don't get it and just wanted to vent a little bit, putting my feelings about linguistic prescriptivism aside.

The idiom is a mistranslation of petitio principii, which is the Latin phrase meaning to assume the intended point, and which itself is a 16th-century mistranslation of Aristotle from around 2,300 years ago, so it’s a wonder that anyone still understands this phrase at all.

I recommend treating this phrase, “to beg the question”, as an irregular verb. The component words provide the inflections, but not the meaning, although there may be some poetic utility.

You could almost say it...

...begs the question.

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