There is a big difference between coining a phrase to describe a recent development, which uses an existing word because of some correspondences (partly humourous) and not knowing the meaning of an existing phrase.
Or to put it another way:
Both ‘spams’ are common and rather looked down on.
You can usually tell the difference from context. (If you can’t you put e.g. ‘spiced meat product’.)
When people muddle up e.g. imply and infer, it’s pointless to say ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
You can see what I’m implying, right?
Sigh. This is such a common problem - essentially, a technical term starts reaching a much broader audience, who change it mean something quite different from its original definition. We’ve had a similar battle over “schizophrenic,” which has a very precise psychiatric meaning and a very imprecise popular meaning. There are lots and lots of others. IMHO, it’s a losing battle: especially in the U.S., we live in a linguistic democracy.
The Humpty-Dumpty slippery slope is incorrect, however - because H-D ignores a fundamental truth of language. Except in extreme cases, language relies on the fact that at least two people understand the same meaning (and in practice it requires many, many more than two). People don’t come up with just random redefinitions - they come up with ones that are useful or intuitive for their community. The elite who seek to preserve an original definition may not like what the hoi polloi do to it, but their bleatings are, ultimately, irrelevant.
but I think that “to beg the question” implies something a bit different from “to raise the question.” You see, if something “raises the question”, then the question has already been raised, whereas if it “begs the question”, the question needs to be raised, but hasn’t yet, it’s begging to be raised.
So I vote that we keep both of the meanings of Begging the Question, as they both serve a useful purpose.
Assuming I understand what it is that you don’t understand, the problem is that “tautology” is a word that describes something in logic, not real life.
Here are some tautologies:
A implies A
B or not B
A and B implies A
Note that those tautologies are meaningless statements about things like “A” and “B”, not actual descriptive sentences about the real world.
In fact, if one attempts to come up with English-language tautologies, you get things like “your name is Tom or it is not Tom”. Which is pretty close, but suffers from the fact that your name might arguably be Tom. The statement “your name is Tom” is not necessarily one that is either true or false.
Anyhow, what ‘A tautology is logically implied by any statement’ means is that you can come up with weird and random sentences like this one:
If cheddar cheese is purple when viewed in the moonlight, then your name is Tom or your name is not Tom.
or
If Fred Phelps is right about everything, then your name is Tom or your name is not Tom.
Obviously, neither of those sentences has any meaning whatsoever. But because the right side (your name is Tom or your name is not Tom) is tautologically true, the whole sentence becomes true.
(The trick here is that “if A then B” is only false if A is true and B is false. So if B is always true, you can stick anything in A, and the whole sentence will always be true.)
In more common parlance, I tend to think of a tautology as a sentence that you can immediately realize is true even without understanding most of the nouns and verbs in it. For instance, “either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow” could be recognized as a true statement even by someone who didn’t know what “rain” or “tomorrow” meant, if you see what I mean. This is not to be confused by a sentence like “rich people have more money than poor people”, which is not a tautology, rather, it is a simple truth based on the definitions of “rich”, “poor” and “money”.
Wait a moment though; you can also tell the difference from context with ‘begs the question’, otherwise we wouldn’t have people noticing and ccomplaining about it, would we?
