Admit it, no matter how tolerant and understanding you might be regarding word usage and other points of grammar — no matter how often you want to tell sticklerish types, hey, calm down, language evolves — some stuff still rankles. Maybe it’s when a person says they’re disinterested but they mean uninterested, or when the singular “person” switches to the plural “they.” Or maybe it’s “it’s” if its apostrophe is unneeded. Sure, there would be less annoyances in everyday life if you hadn’t stopped just now and hissed fewer, but learning to be more open-minded about these matters ain’t easy.
I’m trying. Especially about “begs the question.” Somehow, I’ve long known what that now widely misused phrase actually means, probably thanks to being taught high school English in St. Louis by William A. Bascom. He approached the language with a twinkle, not a cop’s squint, which had a way of making his lessons stick in countless unsuspecting teenage brains. He was the best teacher I ever had.
The concept of “begs the question,” it turns out, goes back to Aristotle in the 4th century B.C. and was defined in the 1920s by H.W. Fowler in his classic “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” as “the fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself.” Fowler supplies an example of question-begging: “Foxhunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun.” In other words, observing that something “begs the question” is a fancy way of saying What are you even talking about?
That’s not how “begs the question” often appears in really modern English usage. Today, lots of people blithely deploy it as just a rhetorical device for setting up a question they want to ask. The Post’s tart stylebook entry for “begging the question” takes a dim view of that approach: “If you mean that something raises the question, write that it ‘raises the question.’” Or prompts the question or brings up the question, anything but begs it.
There was a time when I would have made a smug mental correction upon seeing this headline in the Athletic a few weeks ago: “Michael Malone firing and more beg the question: What’s up with the NBA lately?” And there was a time when I would have summoned some grudging respect for JD Vance when, two weeks ago, the vice president used “beg the question” correctly in an online post saying it’s no big deal that the Constitution was found in the Rose Garden fire pit, or whatever he was spamming people about that day.
But now, in the spirit of bipartisanship, I want to propose a third way for handling the phrase: Kill it, delete it, erase it, cut it but don’t paste it. Sometimes, extinction is preferable to evolution. When a significant portion of the population sees “begs the question” employed correctly and thinks it’s wrong, and a significant other portion of the population sees it employed incorrectly and thinks it’s right, then the phrase has become meaningless for any practical purpose. Misused into uselessness.
Yet “begs the question” usage is rampant! How do I know? Well, I’ve been in the opinions-editing business for about a dozen years and conservatively estimate — at a rate of six op-eds per day, 800 words apiece, six days per week — that I’ve read about 17 million words intended for readers’ edification. All that op-ed consumption is no doubt unhealthy, but it does keep you alive to trends in word usage. (Oh, for the days when “existential” came up only in reference to that Parisian intellectual gargoyle Jean-Paul Sartre.) I can confidently report that writers increasingly seem to think that “begs the question” is the answer.
Don’t take just my word for it. Let’s consult Ngram Viewer, a Google data tool that is such a marvelous time-wasting diversion, it’s almost enough to make you forgive them the intrusive, erratic AI Overview (AI: Accuracy Intermittent). Good old Ngram Viewer, informed by millions of books Google has scanned, will tell you in an instant how frequently words and phrases have been used in books published since 1800. The result for “begs the question” shows the phrase rolling along, with bumps and dips, across the many decades, until 1980, when it begins a rocketing 40-year climb to, by far, its highest-ever usage.
Which is why it must die. I recently cut the phrase from an op-ed column, even though it had been used correctly, on the grounds that too many readers might think, Okay, so what’s the question? The writer asked for it to be restored. “It’s sort of a point of pride for me in using it right,” he said, adding that it’s a “running joke” with a friend when he does so. Much as I admire his dedication, avoiding the phrase entirely is something I strongly, strongly recommend. Begging isn’t even out of the question.
