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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Is the burgeoning use of “beg the question” to mean “bring up or suggest the question” rather than its actual meaning in logic, having to do with circular reasoning, an eggcorn?
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Personally, I’d say it isn’t an eggcorn because it replaces one sense of “to beg” with another sense of the same verb. In most eggcorns, an entirely different lexical item is subsituted for the original.
Nevertheless, it is kinda eggcornish. “To beg the question” in the sense of “to presuppose the very conclusion you’re trying to prove” is really strongly idiomatic; most of us would have trouble saying just exactly what “beg” means in that phrase. The people who use the idiom to mean “to raise the question” seem to be assuming that “beg” means “beg for” here. And that is a very eggcorn-like move: they’re replacing a very opaque usage with one that’s more transparent.
But there’s still something weird about this reanalysis of “beg the question.” In contemporary American English (I’m not sure about British English in this case), the verb “to beg” is usually followed by the preposition “for.” “Begs” without the “for” has a very antique, eighteenth-century sound to my ears. And sure enough, the OED’s early citations for “to beg” are full of examples without the preposition. Here, by contrast, are some Google counts I just did:
“begs for money”: 16,400 raw hits
“begs money”: 1,090 hits
“begs for food”: 14,800 hits
“begs food”: 823 hits
In contemporary (Internet) English, the use of “beg” with “for” is about 15 times as common as the use without. So this newish interpretation of “begs the question” is, paradoxically, a bit old-fashioned.
That’s cool, but I still don’t like it. (Yeah, yeah, I know—so much for being a card-carrying descriptivist.)
Does anyone on the list know whether the use without “for” is more common in Britain (or anywhere else)?
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I am familiar with phrases that use ‘beg’ without ‘for’ such as ‘I beg your pardon’ or ‘I beg forgiveness’. In all cases it is as if the ‘for’ has been dropped out. I am in New Zealand and hear such examples here, but I’ve also read them in many books written by English authors.
The misuse of “begs the question” as an expression is driving me spare at the moment because it seems to have had a sudden increase in popularity with our both of our major television news channels. Newsreaders and reporters both use it incorrectly (or with the ‘new’ meaning’), and I have never heard it used correctly.
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