As an example, when I was as kid (I’m Hispanic) everyone around me pronounced sandwich as “sang-gwich”. My sister however informed me that there is no “g” in the word. And by golly she was right. So I guess I ended up going against the grain and pronouncing it correctly.
In other words, language changes, for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons it changes is that people make mistakes, but if the mistake is common enough, or serves some purpose, it can become part of the language, and no longer is an “error.”
Begs the question is quite likely one such example. It originates with one meaning, but is used in a natural, but “erroneous” way by those who don’t understand its true meaning. Done often enough, it becomes part of the language. To assert at this point that it is “wrong” is somewhat silly, just as it would be silly to assert that someone is using improper English when they talk about “dissing” someone.
I’m not lumping them together, although I didn’t explicitly draw the distinction. But don’t the same arguments as to how to determine correctness apply to both? If you allow that usage is determined by common use, then can’t we say the same about grammar? Normally people put the object after the predicate–you might even say it’s a rule–but it is hardly impenetrable to say, “What light through yonder window breaks?” Did Shakespeare break a rule? Surely it’s clearly understood and not thought to be “wrong” even though people don’t walk around every day saying things like, “This morning a cup of Starbuck’s I drank.” Is that wrong? Or just eccentric?
Another example: This whole business of not ending a sentence with a preposition. Was that ever a rule? Is it today? I don’t even know if there is consensus on that.
No, unfortunately, I don’t. However, even in the face of a retraction of that assertion, it’s still clear that it is an accepted definition of the term. In English. Which, regardless of whether it’s the original meaning or not, is directly contrary to what you posted.
jimpatro, it would be difficult for your post to be more wrong. Beginning to end, it is riddled with errors, distortions, and outright fabrications.
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The issue here is not the stability of the language. No one mentioned the stability of the language. Our language has not “pretty much stabilized”. It is still changing. It is always changing. I would agree that the grammar is changing slower than it once did. And spelling, of course, has become standardized. But still, that is not the issue in this thread.
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The fact that you think that the same standard English is still in use does not mean that the same standard English is still in use. It has changed. It hasn’t changed too terribly much in certain aspects, sure, but it has still changed, and the fact that you are unable to notice these changes despite a thread full of examples of these changes simply means that you are engaging in selection bias.
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Suggesting to people that they use more standard language is unconscionably, unbearably rude. People speak the language that they speak. And most of the time, they speak grammatical sentences based on the dialect that they’re speaking. What you don’t understand is that they do speak correctly given their dialect. You would not be there to help them speak “correctly”. You would be there to help them speak “standardly”. And if they don’t want to speak Standard English, that is their choice. For you to insist that they speak SE is ridiculous. They don’t have to speak according to your whims.
That said, I would agree entirely that everyone in this country should learn to speak Standard English, and I would agree that it is a failure of the US education system that some groups of people fail to learn the standard language.
But going around “correcting” people is counterproductive. Everyone should realize that their dialect, whatever it is, is grammatical. They should know that their own speech, whatever it is, is grammatically correct. And if it would help with their education to teach them the grammar of their native dialect first, and then teach them the Standard Dialect to help them with formal school assignments, job interviews, and the like, then that’s how we should teach them.
But it does not help to have a pedantic stranger tell them that when they say aks (which is not “new”, despite your apparent assertion to the contrary; it’s what Chaucer said), it is somehow wrong. It’s not wrong. It’s what they say. It is correct within their dialect. It does not magically become incorrect just because they’re talking to you.
And with that said, we should remember that just because someone chooses not to speak SE doesn’t mean that they are incapable. Many, many people are fully fluent in SE, but choose not to speak it in informal situations. There is nothing inherently better about SE, but it is not the language of their culture. And that’s the thing to remember: it’s their culture, not yours. If they want to preserve the linguistic aspects of their culture, it’s none of your business.
Finally, the fact that you and your friends laugh at other peoples’ dialects is not a criterion for determining the Standard Language. It’s a personality issue, and so not a subject for GQ.
Asking for alms looks like the oldest (the year 897). I didn’t see an entry for “evading the issue” or anything like it, but the OED of course is slower to update than other dictionaries.
It was never a rule. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (the best damn usage book there is), there is evidence that the postponed preposition goes back to Old English for some constructions. The so-called rule was wrong from the very beginning.
I asked because, ironically enough, I considered that this might an instance of begging the question (a circular argument)! In other words, we’re saying that, since it’s in the dictionary, it’s a widely accepted definition of the word and therefore should make sense. However, if the definition only comes from and applies to this specific single usage (“begging the question,” derived from a Latin translation of Greek philosophical concepts), and doesn’t appear anywhere else for any other usage, isn’t that an argument in favor of the fact that this is NOT widely accepted usage? You’re claiming that this usage of “beg” existed prior to the translation. I was inquiring if that was so, since it’s quite possible that this translation was the first usage of it. In which case, it was not standard at the time, and has never caught on since (except in discussion of this one Philosophical concept, which is an extreme minority of all uses of the word “beg”).
And, just to be clear, since you say this “is directly contrary to what you posted,” here is our exact exchange:
Yes, I’m familiar with the exchange; I was there. Rehashing it doesn’t make you any less wrong.
I stand corrected. Apparently Chaucer invented Ebonics.
No, they don’t. That is the point we’ve been making.
If you did, you’d be wrong. This is an example of people not understanding the rules of grammar and trying to apply rules to style, with disastrous results.
No. He knew what he was doing, and knew how poetic constructions could enhance style.
Just eccentric.
There is more certainly a consensus on that. There has been a consensus on that since forever. Fowler in 1926 called it a “superstition” and said that:
That anybody can still ask the question of whether ending a sentence with a proposition isn’t perfectly correct is all the evidence we need about the pedants harming, not helping, the cause of the English language.
English has four major parts: grammar, spelling, style, and usage. They are basically separate in their application, although the existence of some overlap does lead to confusion. Their rate of change increases in the order I list them. (I’m speaking here of Standard English.) Grammar is quite stable. Spelling changes less rapidly, mostly to simplify spelling. Style has also simplified greatly over the course of the last century, but the big break came after WWI, with writers like Hemingway knocking the encrustations out of style. Usage changes significantly from decade to decade.
What is crucial to understand is that change is a constant. Nothing about change changes. The English language changed in hugely significant ways in each of the four respects in the 20th century, in the 19th century, in the 18th century, and in every century before that. There has never been a moment in which the English language was not changing so rapidly that some set of pedants weren’t loudly decrying the change and calling the changers idiots and demanding that they all bow down to the rules of how she used to be spoke. There was never a moment in which some people didn’t proclaim that the language was being corrupted or destroyed.
I mean that quite literally. There was never a moment that was not exactly like today. The rate of change may have increased, the rate of change in some areas may been speeding up, the globalization of English as the world’s language is creating change at an exponential rate, but the basics of change have never changed.
The prescriptivists have never been correct in anything they say. They were wrong when the taught your high school English teachers the rules they smashed into your heads with a ruler and they were wrong when they taught those teachers’ teachers. People who say there is a single correct English have always been wrong, are wrong today, and are likely to be wrong forever.
English has never been corrupted or destroyed. It is not being so now, no matter how much fury I feel when I see apostrophes in plurals. English gets stronger, deeper, more flexible, more expressive, and better every day. It is the most amazing language that has ever existed on earth.
But it’s up to us to understand it in all its complexity, not for us to bind it with unthinking rules to protect ourselves from our ignorance of it.
All languages have dialects. They have existed since the beginning of language. There are always Standard dialects, but they are simply the dialect of the powerful, not the “correct” dialect. Dialects are not random variants of words, either. They tend to follow certain patterns from the positioning of vowels and consonants in the mouth during speech, which is why a variant like “aks” shows up again and again in widely scattered times and locations. Many of these dialectal variants have entered the language as standard pronunciations, with only experts aware of their non-standard history. I guarantee, without ever hearing you speak, that you use some every day.
toadspittle, I don’t understand your argument either. You appear to be saying that because you don’t know a usage of a term, it shouldn’t be used, even if it is part of the technical jargon used by experts and carried over metaphorically into the common language (a process that has happened tens of thousands of times).
Begging the question is, by definition, perfectly accurate, because that is the term used for that particular rhetorical mistake. That you can come up with a synonym means nothing. Every profession has its jargon and that jargon cannot be denied or gainsaid by outsiders.
Well, your first point (original definition) appears to be completely wrong. I see no evidence that your second point (not original, but once common and accepted definition) is not also wrong.
A cite in support of your argument (that the usage of “beg” to mean “take for granted without proof” was already common at the time the philosophical argument was translated in the 16th century) would not be amiss.
Actually, the sum total of my argument is that your claim that the original meaning of the expression “begging the question” is “not very accurate, at least in English” is wrong. The rest was merely supportive, and if (as it appears to be, based on the OED reference cited earlier) it was not correct, it’s irrelevant to the main point here.
I am not trying to argue from an intransigent position–but I am having trouble understanding one thing. If we agree with the above (and there is much to agree with), how can we possibly teach English? I think the easy way out is to teach it as though there were immutable rules, then you don’t invite any dissent from the pliable minds of your young students and classroom management is easier. This is how I learned through 12+ years of so-called education. But what would be the *right * way to teach it?
I concede your point, to a degree. But I deny that it’s wrong to call out crappy verbiage. There’s plenty of jargon from my own field that I think is a bunch of crap, and frequently say so to my colleagues. For instance, calling the sketches that one makes of proposed Web sites “wireframes.” Pretentious garbage. “Sketches” works just as well, and is even more accurate, since “wireframes” tries to graft a 3D sculptural term with which few people are familiar onto the 2D world of Web design, and 2D visual prototypes are already called sketches. (Unfortunately, one can charge a hell of a lot more for “wireframes” than for sketches, so the jargon lives on.)
The problem with pitting descriptivism gainst prescriptivism in these arguments is that descriptivism sets out by positing as an axiom of how it works the bone of contention between the two schools of thought. I’d explain the fallacy behind this using the apposite technical term, but, um… 
Why teach English?
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We’re getting away from GQ territory, I think, but English class does have its use. It just needs to be made clearer that it’s compositional English. Nobody needs to teach a kid how to speak English, but writing and composition do require some instruction. Nothing as silly as “don’t use hopefully” or “don’t use prepositions at the end of a sentence,” but English class is a great place to learn spelling, vocabulary, parts of a sentence, word classifications, composition for clarity, registers, etc. Grammar shouldn’t even be a part of it.
You can only teach registers in accounting.
How does descriptivism do so in a way which prescriptivism does not? This seems to me like saying “The problem with comparing Catholicism and Protestantism is that Catholicism sets out by positing that there is a bone of contention between the two schools of thought.”
(Your position here seems a bit odd in an amusing way: if descriptivism intrinsically posits a bone of contention between itself and prescriptivism, then descriptivism would seem to be, necessarily, as a result, correct on at least that one point; it could hardly be taken to task for that. I imagine you want to say "Well, we could adopt a variant of the thing I am considering as ‘descriptivism’ which does not conflict with what I am considering as ‘prescriptivism’. But then, if you are willing to consider that variant as ‘descriptivism’, then the problem you are posing no longer exists; we can again pit them against each other to our heart’s contents. :))