Does Grammar Beg the Question?
“Watching” language nerds argue over the proper usage of “begs the question” is just a completely insane and inane experience.
Well, I guess it’s not so much proper usage as it is acceptable usage. The proper usage is to refer to the logical fallacy of including the question as a given in the answer, as such.
But, the phrase has more utility and color when used for the alternate purpose, which is to indicate that the prior content really makes one need a new question answered.
It’s just like how I tend to start a lot of sentences in my blog with “But.” I believe many people consider it a hard-and-fast English rule to forbid beginning a sentence with “But.” However, beginning a sentence with “However” [intended] is rarely questioned.
I consider the leading “but” to be a nice conversational/self-argumentative device. I also consider it essentially on equal footing with however. However is not a conjunction, and the rule is drawn on conjunctions.
I would say this type of rule is in the same class as the “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule. It’s like a guideline to keep one from sounding stupid.
I suggest “but” is equal in function to “however” when it’s used at the front of the sentence. Pencilheads strike again.
I would say I am surprisingly liberal when it comes to the evolution of language. Watching words being invented and refined is an exciting part of the cultural experience in my eyes. I am much less liberal about written grammar and structure, but mostly written grammar.
Language is bendable, but written grammar in my view is more an expression of respect and dignity. This biggest reason written grammar gets this treatment from me is that we don’t use this type of grammar when we speak (capitalization, punctuation, heck, even spacing).
Written language does not get this treatment, but in recent years the function of written language in burst-type communication like SMS is becoming a proxy for spoken language. Hence the breakdown.
Language is constantly tested by its viability in spoken form. The who/whom situation in English, which is just about as out of control as the predicate nominative pronoun debacle, is a perfect example. We simply, even as particularly expert native speakers, do not have the real-time cognitive resources to figure out when to say who or whom in a real clunker of a sentence.
Even people like me who are quite particular about who/whom are really just applying a few heuristic shortcuts that work most of the time. Like, /always use whom after a preposition/ or /start sentences with who/.
Of course:
“Whom I am going to invite is none of your business.”
blows your heuristic battleship right out of the water. In fact, my proofing run on this article made me really consider the “Even people like me…” sentence above. That who is in a sort of participial thing but is serving as the subject of its clause, and the clause modifies “people” not “me.” I mean, dang, I didn’t even try to make that one hard.
And the sheer unviability of:
“The people most interested in the outcome of the Martian crisis are most certainly they.”
Makes you cringe with irrelevance.
Grammarians are funny when they hear this type of sentence spaghetti going on in practice. My experience (and my own behavior, I’m sure) is to see a brief rolling-back of the eyes, lips moving slightly reconstructing the sentence in sensible grammar-order (“They are the people…”) and then a brief nod, like, “Yeah, that’s right. Good job there.”
Of course, the time you spend making people roll their eyes back to check your grammar is time they aren’t listening to all the questions you beg afterward. It lacks utility. It makes you seem like you rehearsed it. And, to get something really impressive right, you probably did.
Try to take all the “you“s out of that paragraph above, replacing them with the gramatically-preferred “one.” You sound like the flipping Queen of England.
I’ve read creative writing by people who probably were trained by completely unqualified teachers to count sentences, use a certain number of semicolons and “complex sentences” per paragraph, and always have less than N words in their thesis. It’s awful, like, get this out of my face kind of awful. It’s awful because it’s so generic.
These people are also thesaurus monkeys, or shall I say simians. Yeah, I’ll say simians because it makes me sound smarter. “Monkey” is so 10th grade.
But don’t get me started there…