I grew up in the house of a grammar nazi and must admit to personally harbouring the desire to purge all impure syntax and logical fallacies from the world. My personal hobby horse (yes, well, make that one of my personal hobby horses) is the continual use of “begging the question” when the speaker means “brings us to the question”. Surely it isn’t that difficult to add 2 words and change a gerund to a transitive verb?
What is begging the question? It is a simple fallacy of logic in which a premise is assumed to be true without any proof and the statement/argument is built on that unproven assumption. It is like saying an orange is sweet because it is a fruit. Or the classic example, a lawyer stands up to cross examine a witness and asks only one question: “Have you stopped beating your wife?”.
I’m not going into a belaboured explanation of this idea because that begs the question you need any concept more complicated than breathing simplified to the point it can be illustrated with sock puppets. I leave that to a certain news channel that is also serves as a vibrant example of an oxymoron.
What will amaze and astound you now is just how many otherwise apparently intelligent people misuse the phrase. Just remember this one thing: if the phrase “raises the question” or “leads us to the question” can be substituted for “begs the question” you may immediately press the X button and eject the participant from the island.
Pardon my mixed metaphors….
jumbo shrimp, military intelligence...oh, right...
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