It's not a useful phrase, because nobody knows what it means, and the words "begging the question" themselves don't make sense as a description of the fallacy.
That almost sounds like a circular argument.
I have read the Wikipedia article and I understand what the fallacy is, but for the life of me I cannot stretch my imagination enough to accommodate how "begging the question" fits into it.
When I hear "begging the question" I immediately think of the abstract idea of someone actually begging a question for something. When I read about the logical fallacy, it sounds like it comes from "request for the beginning or premise". In my mind, the phrase should then be "begging for the question" which is still a stretch, but at least I can conceptualize it.
Therefore, it always takes me quite a few cycles to remember what "begging the question" really means because of the complete lack of intuitiveness. I also found this to be true for the term "dynamic programming".
If anyone could explain a better intuition for this phrase, I would greatly appreciate it.
Consider the example from wikipedia:
Person 1: He is mad right now.
Person 2: How do you know?
Person 1: Well, because he is really angry.
If you think of it in terms of the meaning of beg as evade, then Person 1 is begging the inquiry of Person 2. She is evading it by restating the premise.
The fact that language evolves is no excuse to just randomly mangle and distort it. English isn't even my native language and I bloody know what it means.