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Comment by itcmcgrath | Hacker News Reader

Just a note: 'It begs the question' doesn't mean what I think you think it means.

1. if a statement or situation begs the question, it causes you to ask a particular question It's all very well talking about extra staff but it rather begs the question of how we're going to pay for them.

-- Cambridge Idiom Dictionary, 2nd ed.

As a philosophical term of art, 'Begging the question' is a logical fallacy whereby the conclusion of an argument is just the restatement of the premise(s).

Commonly however, it is used to mean 'raises or leads the question'.

Whether the common usage is correct or not depends on which side of the descriptive/prescriptive language fence one sits on. (A matter totally off topic)

I am aware of its philosophical meaning. But normally one does not correct someone's usage of a word if that usage is in the dictionary, even if it might not have been fifty years ago, except if the topic under discussion is philosophy or logic.

Yes, but that's not what the phrase originally meant. Its usage has changed over the years to the point where things like your source consider the new version to be accurate.

However, there are many - including myself for a time - who still fight to preserve the original meaning. I stopped doing it when I realized that a) English is a fluid language, and b) some people - again, possibly including myself - simply liked to correct people to show off.

Yes, and we originally said things like thee and thy. And thy meant my, or some crap like that.

"Thy" meant "your". Close enough!

And then y'all started talking to each other in plural all the time.

(OK, so 'you' was used as a formal singular for a long time too, but I like my version better)

I really love y'all and you'ze - because the grammatical construct exists in other languages such as Spanish.

Those words are used by some English speaking cultures because they are useful.

I wonder of the usage is emergent (independent rediscovery), or a cultural meme transferred from another language?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Another fascinating journey on the good ship Wikipedia.

Horatio, thou art a scholar!

I hate this trivially predictable response. Similar to observations of Betteridge's Law of headlines, "begs the question" corrections just seem like HN karma pumps.

I don't give a shit about karma.

Notably, it does not mean what the logical grouping of those words would mean: "begs for the question to be asked".

Of course, I believe I've seen "begs the question" used correctly exactly never, and there's an obvious need for a pithy idiom for "begs for the question to be asked", but we don't really have one.

This once again awakens my suspicions that the English language is an elaborate practical joke. And I say that as a native speaker.

> and there's an obvious need for a pithy idiom for "begs for the question to be asked"

"raises the question".

Educated people saved the word "irony" once, "begs the question" isn't gone yet.

The misuse of "irony" is another one of those situations that seems to show that there's a missing word in the English language.

To take one specific example from Alanis, (yes I'm going there), there's something peculiarly funny about "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife" in a way that wouldn't be if you had "ten thousand turtles when all you need is a knife". I think we needed a word for "bittersweet happenstance", and people wrongly latched onto "irony".

There is a term for this: "irony of fate" [1].

Which is presumably where the confusion with irony (as a stand-alone word) comes from.

Interestingly enough, the term exists in a literal translation in other languages, too: "Ironie des Schicksals" in German, "ironie du sort" in French, and "ironia della sorte" in Italian.

[1] http://www.bartleby.com/81/8963.html

I like 'begging' more than 'raising'. The question is not just there but highlighted in neon.

It's just a way of filling time and distancing yourself from the question. Irregardless of pendantry about the definition you usually improve your sentence by just leaving it out.

"Irregardless of the pedantry[...]"

I'm just going to assume that's intentional irony. Genius.

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