Natzi mods chomping at the bit to question Gaudere with sharp sticks about hopefully begging Godwin for all intensive purposes,
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or something?
CMC +fnord!
Oh, and fuck (since it is the Pit)!
I think we’re talking past each other. Your phrasing suggest that you still believe your preferred usage is definitively right, which is counter to everything I’m saying. What is your basis for asserting that your preferred usages are always superior to these publications’ usages for communicating their messages to their readers? To simply say “they’re wrong” because a particular book agrees with your preferences is to ignore the purpose of language entirely.
A dictionary’s job is to tell you what words mean, not what they should mean. I would suggest that you consult a better dictionary. Which one were you looking at?
I’ve got here on my screen the American Heritage, available to peruse online, and it lists this meaning of individual as a “Usage Problem” (which means that some people complain) and the dictionary remarks in the usage note that “[individual] lends a formal or even pretentious tone that may be undesirable”. Consummate professionals that they are, the dictionary people don’t tell you not to use it - they just say that it might be a good idea to avoid it.
I happen to agree with them. “Person” is a good choice is almost any context. So is it a problem?
That depends entirely on you. I’d recommend against it, but as you said, you won’t be misunderstood if you use it. You might piss some people off, even though they’ll understand you perfectly, and that might be a good argument against using it. Or you know what? Depending on your own goals, that might be a good argument for using the word. Whether or not this usage is a problem is directly dependent on your goals as a speaker or writer.
According to the linguist I talked to, the best guess is that their brains simply won’t develop properly. They will be mentally retarded for the rest of their lives with no possibility of making up for the time they lost in their childhood. You couldn’t possibly run the experiment, though, because of the sheer cruelty.
That is, unless you’re a medieval emperor. Frederick II supposedly did this experiment in an attempt to find out whether Greek or Latin or Hebrew or what was the original language of man. Apparently, the babies all died.
Okay, first, it’s up to each publication to decide which standard it wants to employ. Each of their chosen standards are different. So there’s no use in applying one standard to all of them. If you want to hold them accountable for some abstract notion of “laziness”, then you need to find out from each of them what their guidelines are.
If you disagree with their guidelines, then that’s tough. They made their choice, and we have to live with it. It still bothers me that the AP guidelines prescribe against using the serial comma, but I just shake my head now and move on.
And even with an easy-to-follow standard, no publication will be free of errors. Even with the best writers and best copy-editors, mistakes will inevitably creep onto the final printed page. This is especially true in the newspaper biz where deadlines are so pressing. And I’ve heard tell that there are some writers who don’t really give two shits about spelling. They’re more concerned with the ideas than formal writing conventions. It’s up to you whether to consider them lazy. I personally don’t. Shakespeare lived before spelling conventions, but his writing was still pretty nifty, and he was way too damn prolific for anybody to call him lazy.
It’s great that you have your own theories on how language works best. Just thinking about these issues will almost certainly improve your writing. But don’t expect me to agree with your decisions. “Begs the question” in the sense of “demands that the question be asked” has a taste to it that I like. So I’m just going to use “circular reasoning” when I mean “circular reasoning”, and I’m gonna use “begs the question” in the newer sense whenever I feel it’s appropriate.
And I don’t particularly care if you don’t like it. I need to make choices, too. You might dislike my choices, but that doesn’t make them incorrect or improper or unfit for publication. My writing is unfit for publication for entirely different reasons.
No, that’s not what prevents you from being understood. The specific reason no one understands you when you use the phrase, “begs the question,” is that the phrase bears no relation to the individual meaning of its component words. There’s no way anyone can understand what that phrase means unless they are specifically instructed in the meaning of that particular term of art. If you sat down every single English-speaking individual on the planet and instructed him on the proper meaning of the phrase, it would still be less than a generation before the “incorrect” definition began gaining currency again, as each new English speaker who was exposed to it would immediatly parse it using its literal definition.
Do you think the average writer is making a choice when he uses “an individual” instead of “a person”? Or do you think he is ignorant of the distinction?
I know I make a lot errors of usage out of ignorance. But, here is the thing, I am not a professional writer.
Hmmm… In the grand existential way in which everything we do is a choice, sure. But I think you probably meant a narrower sense, that the average writer is consciously and deliberately balancing the pros and cons of the two words and then makes a final determination about which is best. Do writers engage in that deliberate process?
To that, I’d say: definitely maybe.
I mean, they certainly do make these conscious decisions at least some of the time. There are ess-eff writers on the boards who often participate in these language threads (including some of your GQ threads, if I remember right), and given their obviously well-considered opinions, there are at least some issues that they think a great deal about.
But you’re guilty of over-idealization of them if you believe that they should be aware of every potentially disputed usage.
The thing is, it’s possible to be totally ignorant of any distinction as far as dictionary definitions go, and yet still in some sense know, deep down, what the difference is between the two words. Until you brought it up, I had no idea that there was a usage dispute about “individual”. Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit here, but even given my ignorance of that, I don’t think that I would’ve often used it in the way that bothers you. I haven’t done any statistical analyses of available corpuses, but my gut tells me that the word is just not used all that often to mean just “a person” without reference to a larger group.
I’m just speculating here, but my feeling about really good writers isn’t that their usage is “perfect” (which is impossible, anyway, given the myriad disputes among ardent prescriptivists). I think good writers just have smarter gut instincts than the average schmoe. This isn’t to say that their knowledge is perfect and that they never misfire - it’s just that they tend to misfire less often than the non-professional, just like Tiger Woods normally drives the ball down the fairway, but still sometimes has an off day.
And frankly, it’s not their job to be perfect. It’s their job to sell. Dan Brown is considered by some a stunningly awful prose stylist. But he sells. That’s fine. The people out there are free to like his books for whatever reason, and descriptive linguist Geoff Pullum (the guy from my link) is free to make a hilarious dissection of the opening page.
Being professionals does not necessarily give them the obligation to be especially conscientious with their language. It means only that people are willing to buy what they write.
In support of 2 1/2 "(fun), there is a difference between publications making informed choices and ignorant choices, just as there are for people. Sports Illustrated will have a different style guide from The New Yorker (not counting when that woman was editor). The New York Times has a very rigid style guide, which Safire mentions often. Sure they make mistakes, but they often try to correct them in later editions. My local paper probably has a style guide, but it seems that the writers and editors they choose to hire are too stupid to either follow it or understand it. There have been some real howlers in some headlines, for instance.
Serial commas, for example, are an example (or is an example) of something which had no right answer, though the answer of any publication should be consistent. Begging the question is different. It comes from a lack of understanding of what the term means. Any style guide written by someone who understands the issue should have the same entry, at least until the cancer has spread further. That is probably the case for “hopefully” at this point.
There is also the case of the tin ear. If I were writing dialog for a cop, I would definitely use “individual.” If I were writing it for a slacker, never.
He doesn’t mention “invites the question?” Or “leads us to wonder?” Or “makes us wonder?”
-FrL-
I think it should be:
The serial comma, for example, is …
This is just plain wrong. It (likely) came from a lack of understanding of what the term has meant. It (likely) originated as a mistake. That time is now passed. What it means today is not exclusively what it meant two hundred years ago, and that is that. Though the new usage quite possibly started as a mistake (I don’t know how you’d actually demonstrate that), the mistake is now over. Pack your bags, roll up the tent. This is not the place to expend your effort.
And you continue with truly cringe-worthy hyperbole in defense of a position that is objectively wrong. And hopefully, too? The Whack-a-Mole continues. If you’re seriously complaining about hopefully, then you have so internalized breathtakingly false conceptions about correctness in English that you are left with no comprehension whatever about how language change actually works.
I don’t know how old you are, but it is simply impossible to grow up as a member of the English speaking world today, or even four decades ago, and think that hopefully meaning “I hope/let us hope” is in any way, shape, or form an error without having had that notion forcibly entered into your head. You cannot listen to English speech or read English writing and come to this conclusion. In order to have a contrary opinion, you must have either gained your English proficiency before the 1960s, or you had an English instructor you trusted beyond reason, or you made a decision that it was wrong from reading a book while simultaneously ignoring the wealth of evidence all around you, every day, that hopefully is impeccable English.
When beg the question originated is quite irrelevant. Beg the question is not so widespread yet that it has to be accepted, especially since there is a perfectly reasonable and correct alternative.
Not everyone has to accept the "five people are misusing a word. Give up and put it in the dictionary position. (No doubt the 1961 Merriam Webster.) I learned to read and speak before hopefully was misused. Like I said, I’ve given up, but I don’t have to like it. I hear people misusing less and fewer all the time also. Is that something else we need to give up on. Hopefully actually fills a gap, so I can kind of see its acceptance.
The wonderful thing about English is that there are words to express nuances of meaning. Why would we want to smear these together because major parts of the population don’t read enough and didn’t pay attention in school enough to understand the distinctions? (Or had English teachers who didn’t care.) We who care about precision may lose, but it’s a good fight anyway.
This is rather dishonest of you. No one starts these pit threads when only a few people misuse a word. They only complain after the mistake has become widely accepted and widely used and therefore is no longer a mistake.
Do you object to frankly and thankfully as well?
Yeah, they’ve been “misusing” that one since Chaucer’s time.
I like keeping “beg the question” straight, but it’s certainly not an issue of precision. As has been pointed out on this thread, there are easier and more intuitive ways to say the thing meant classically by “beg the question,” (“circular reasoning” for example,) and the phrase “beg the question” itself suggests more intuitively exactly the kind of thing many people misuse it to mean.
-FrL-
Your notion of “correctness” is absurdly egocentric. You think it’s incorrect simply because you, and people like you, dislike it. That’s not how it works. Grammatical and semantic correctness is determined by usage. That is the only way to determine correctness, or we are left with the asinine alternative that English speakers don’t speak English.
That is a complete strawman, and yet more evidence that you don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Column space in a dictionary is valuable real estate. There are plenty of errors that more than five people have made that haven’t made it into a dictionary. Hell, there are scads of perfectly cromulent English words that are just too technical and esoteric to warrant admission into a general purpose dictionary.
Lexicographers use statistical techniques to determine whether a usage has developed adequately, and “five people are misusing a word” is not even close to sufficient. In fact, your very belief that “begs the question” in its newer sense is still uncommon is proof positive that you have spent no time at all figuring out how prevalent it is. I just completed a Lexis-Nexis search and came across an entire page of entries in which the newer sense was the only one that I saw.
I didn’t use Google for this. Lexis searches professionally edited publications, and the entries were all examples from the past two years. I wasn’t looking too hard, but if it is difficult to find a single example of your notion of the “correct” usage in a random web search (ignoring complaints about language such as this thread), but I find literally pages and pages of the “incorrect” usage, then you might want to face the fact that you’re simply acting the ostrich and refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming prevalence of a usage that you dislike.
I don’t want you to give up caring about language. I want you to spend time educating yourself before you complain.
For example, you were misinformed about “less/fewer”. What you were taught was wrong. Chaucer has already been mentioned, but the less/fewer thing goes back much farther than that. You are whining about a “misuse” that has characterized English for more than one thousand years. Is that not good enough for you? If people have been making this “mistake” for damn near as long as English has been written down, is it still wrong?
And let’s be clear here: there absolutely is a distinction between less and fewer in English. But what the distinction actually is, and what ignorant pedants complain about, are two entirely different things. This is explained in more depth in my link, but the essence of the matter is that the distinction between less and fewer is very subtle. There are lots of rules and exceptions (and yes, a bit of overlap), which means that the people who taught you a simple rule didn’t know what the flying fuck they were talking about.
There are many good fights, and I might join you for some of them. Shakespeare, for instance, used contemptuous and contemptible interchangeably, but nowadays we generally like to distinguish between those two words, and for good reason. The difference between us is that I’m trying to figure out what the language is before I tell other people what’s right and wrong. So if I hear someone say “He’s contemptible of people who speak poorly,” I could gently mention that that might’ve worked for Shakespeare, but it doesn’t work today.
But yes, sometimes useful distinctions are swallowed that I would rather have kept separate. “Begging the question” isn’t an example of that, though. “Circular reasoning” or even the Latin petitio principii is still available if your goal is to make yourself understood. And that development is not in the slightest unfortunate. I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s been said in this thread, but there is no possible way to tell what “begging the question” means just by looking at. If you use the fancy Latin and force people to look it up, then at least you’re letting them know it’s a technical term. But if today you use “beg the question” in its older sense, you’re doing so simply because you don’t give a damn if you confuse people.
Don’t give up fighting the good fight. But for godsake, find out what the good fight is before bumbling into a thread talking about “misuse”. And that means admitting it when the language has finally moved on, even if you still hate it.
I don’t know how much ground you’ll gain with your posts in this thread, Kendall, but may I say that they’re as excellent a way of expressing the linguistics/descriptive side of the discussion as I’ve seen on these boards.
I think register is an issue here as well. I’d be suprised if you could get away with* using “begs the question” in the “invites the question” sense in an academic journal, for example.
-FrL-
*Or anyway, I’d be suprised if, should an editor let the usage slip through, they would not feel like they had made a mistake were it pointed out to them.
One writer’s take:
The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams: Would I find “Vaudeville” on a map?
I couldn’t disagree more. I’m an academic, and I would really be surprised if I were “corrected” about this.
Really?!
Well, maybe it’s because I’m in Philosophy. Maybe it’s in philosophical journals that this would be frowned on, since we think of “begging the question” as a term for a specific informal fallacy. I had the impression this was pretty general across academia, but maybe I was wrong.
-FrL-
I swear I was actually going to post something like:
I could see this in Philosophy journals, but that would be an example of jargon.
