Earl Snake-Hips Tucker: People also used to get worked up over mixing Greek and Latin in a compound word. Tell me how much sense that prohibition made.
This seems like a useful distinction, but doubt that it’s a common distinction.
I like to think that I’m a descriptivist – if someone says that “ain’t” isn’t a word, I point out that it is a word, *irregardless * of what they say – but I’ve been peeved at what I considered to be the “wrong” use of begs the question. This thread has been an eye-opener.
Also, I had formulated some thoughts about prescriptivism/descriptivism but I found a Wikipedia article, Linguistic Prescription, that echoes my thoughts:
To use a spelling/pronunciation analogy.
Most people pronounce “mischievous” as mis-chee-vee-us.
There’s no extra “i” or “e” sound in that word.
There are some of us who pronounce it as mis-chi-vus.
Are we wrong?
Nope.
Are the others wrong?
Yep.
What is wrong with educating the masses and addressing their ignorance?
Why can’t people be corrected as to the correct usage of “begging the question”?
Those supposed “good writers” who misuse it need a wakeup call.
Actually, it does. It means “using grease taken from cats in cuisine gives mediocre results.”
jimpatro: Because you dictate neither pronunciation nor usage.
That position does invite other questions (I’d prefer not to beg). I would like to amplify **Frylock’s ** question:
Can we *ever * use the terms “correct” or “error”? How do we teach grammar and usage if we can’t? If my English teacher gives me an F for saying “I ain’t going to have no lunch today,” do I tell her that her prescriptivism can’t be defended intellectually, and there are hundreds of thousands of English speakers (if not millions) for whom this is common usage?
Then there is the more nebulous question of what is the threshold for declaring that something is common usage? In the example I mentioned earlier, “comprise” started out meaning “include” (I do not have a scholarly etymology of this word but that is implied by its Latin roots), as in, “The class comprised 30 students.” It has come to be used commonly to mean “compose” such as “Thirty students comprised the class” or even “The class was comprised of 30 students.” Did the first person to use it the second way commit an error, or was that person simply a trendsetter for a new usage? If you deny that it was an error, then does that give me license to say anything I want with impunity? The point was made well by Lewis Carroll:
Of course, there are no grammar laws and grammar police (in a literal sense) because language does evolve naturally. But that doesn’t mean that we have to discard the notions of standard or non-standard, correct or incorrect.
:smack:
I don’t know what’s worse: That I failed at failing, or that I didn’t realize I failed until you pointed it out to me.
Grammar is a totally separate part of English from usage. You can’t lump them together. Grammar does have rules. Usage has conventions. People think that because grammar has rules, then usage must also have them. Your confusion shows where the confusion stems from in this entire discussion.
Do you have an OED, QED, to assert that Def. 3 is definitely the original meaning?
That’s where we get to the notion of registers or levels of language. In formal writing, “I ain’t going to have no lunch today” is incorrect. But it ain’t incorrect in informal speech.
oddly enough, 2a says
So “begging the question” according to this means “evading or dodging answering questions”, which is closer to the way people are using it than either the common use of “pleading” or the debate sense of 2b “assuming that which is to be proven”.
Excellent question. With the caveat that my colleagues down the hall are professional linguists, but that I personally am not, it essentially amounts to how widespread and how consistent the “error” is, and in what contexts the “error” appears.
The first and most obvious criterion is the percentage of speakers and writers who employ the usage. Once we’ve shot past 50 percent, then the question is settled.
The more puzzling questions center around cases like “nucular”, where a well-entrenched minority of speakers favor what used to be (and what many still consider) an incorrect pronunciation. “Nucular” was common enough in the Midwest and the South to easily count as a regional variation. But that still means that it might still be incorrect as far as Standard English is concerned.
And so what we see, linguistically, is a spread of the usage from “incorrect in all cases” to “correct within an individual’s regional dialect” (because, after all, that’s the way that they consistently speak), to a borderline case where we have to start asking ourselves whether the pronunciation is now fully standard.
Though descriptive linguists are widely blamed for being fairly liberal in allowing that last hurdle to be past, they generally have a wealth of information (in the form of extensive corpuses of both written and spoken English with which they do statistical analyses) in order to bolster their determinations. So when I say that “nucular” is now a standard pronunciation, I can rely on the fact that the pronunciation is used, as the M-W definition states, by “scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, United States cabinet members, and at least two United States presidents”. Actually I think we’re up to 3.5 US Presidents now (Eisenhower, Carter (sorta), Clinton (who used both pronunciations), and Dubya).
These people are the elites, and when a noticeably widespread portion of elite speakers consistently partake of the usage, we need to reevaluate our previous judgments, even if the usage remains favored by only a minority of speakers. When we’re trying to figure out what’s “correct English”, we want to know what people actually say.
There are, of course, some who will dig in their heels and claim that despite the widespread use, “nucular” remains an error. And frankly, it can be hard to argue that point in and of itself unless we look at a broader linguistic context. There’s no magic percentage that transforms a usage from correct to incorrect. Even when we reach the safe 50% mark, that doesn’t mean that the old pronunciation is suddenly kicked out of the Standard Club. If I did, I could argue that “begs the question” is an error when it’s used to mean “Petitio Principii”, because most people don’t use it that way.
And this is exactly the problem with labeling “nucular” nonstandard. I’d wager that it’s at least as popular as the traditional meaning of “begs the question”. But if we’re going to grandfather in “begs the question”, then where do we draw the line? Do we grandfather in the French pronunciation of “forte” as well?
When you really start to dig into these questions, the only sensible solution is to accept all widespread elite usages as “correct”.
So, no, we don’t have to accept CookingWithGas’s sentence [sup]![/sup]“I ain’t going to have no lunch today,” because this sort of negative concord almost never shows up in professional speech. And so linguists (rightly) call it a nonstandard dialect.
This sort of question always shows up in these threads, as if determining correctness by usage allows every damn thing under the sun. As professional grammarian Geoff Pullum describes the problems in Language Log:
Yes, there absolutely is correctness in language. “I see the dog” is a correct sentence. *“I see dog the” is not. “I’m not going to have lunch today” is standard. [sup]![/sup]“I ain’t going to have no lunch today” is nonstandard.
From the article I linked earlier, it appears that the original Greek word means both “assume” and “beg:” thus, “assuming the question” probably would have been a better rendering.
From the OED: The English “begs the question” doesn’t show up until several hundred years of the use of “beg,” meaning pretty much today what it means today (to ask for alms).
Good post, Kendall Jackson.
No, but it may piss the listener off. Shouldn’t that count for something?
I wonder why it is that everybody I know laughs when someones says “nucular”?
Or “prostrate” when they really mean “prostate”. The list goes on.
I think maybe we’re seeing Political Correctness at it’s worst.
Some of you just can’t admit that the English language has pretty much stabilized.
I’m 48 and I don’t know of any word or term that has completely disappeared from the language since I was in elementary school. Vocabulary wise new technological terms and much slang has been introduced. But the same standard English I learned in third grade is still in use.
If we can correct a child when they say “ammonia” when they really mean “pneumonia”, then why stop there?
If someone living in an urban area “axes a question”, what is wrong with suggesting they “ask a question”? If their parents didn’t teach them or their teacher didn’t teach them, by golly we can teach them. Rather than pretend they’ve invented a new dialect.
Well, there are several ways to solve that problem, and it seems to me the most reasonable don’t necessitate a proscription on the discussed usage of “begs the question”. If I were to happen to find that a small number of people get pissed off at hearing words with the letter ‘K’ in them, I probably wouldn’t change my usage to bend to their will either.
Yes. Absolutely. And it might be smart to avoid using “begs the question” in its newer sense for exactly that reason.
But you also have a problem if your audience misunderstands what you’re saying. Shouldn’t that count for something?
The prescriptive Garner’s Modern American Usage has an excellent mini-essay on “Skunked Terms”, which are words that have undergone transitions like “begs the question”, and so can’t be used without confusing part of your audience or offending part of your audience. So what do you do? Garner recommends avoiding these terms entirely, thus making them “skunked”. He makes a convincing case that people simply shouldn’t use these words in order to make their writing more palatable to the largest possible audience. Makes perfect sense, if your goal in writing and speaking is precisely identical to Bryan Garner’s goals.
Mine aren’t. Garner says that “hopefully” is a Skunked Term, which I find utterly asinine. Do you see the problem? Different people will have different trade-offs when it comes to their willingness to offend or confuse their audience.
I am very much willing to offend any reader with my use of “hopefully”, simply because it’s been Standard English since the 1960s, longer than I’ve been alive. If people still have a bug up their ass about that one, then I have no sympathy whatsoever. It is literally impossible for anyone born after the 1960s to know there’s a problem with that word by reading or listening to English. You actually have to be taught that jackass prescription, and then deliberately internalize the rule in spite of its overwhelming use.
With respect to “begs the question”? I normally avoid it, but sometimes it conveys exactly the right sort of oomph that I’m going for.
But you see the situation? If we’re to continue talking down this path, then we’ll leave the realm of language facts and enter a more IMHO or Cafe Society sort of discussion about aesthetics and personal preferences.
The GQ answer is that “begs the question” has two basic meanings, and so it can be confusing. Beyond that, we’re into subjective opinions, and everyone is going to have a slightly different idea.
I think you mean this is political correctness gone mad!!
Tossing aside the “new”, we hardly need to pretend they have their own dialect (or lect, anyway); it’s manifestly obvious that they do. They didn’t pick up their pronunciation in a vacuum; that’s the way the people around them speak. What makes this any different from any other dialect?
My point is that they could have learned that they mean “ask” when they say “axe” and this wouldn’t be destroying a culture. The people around them also include parents and teachers.