Like Soldiers in the Winter’s Night With a Vow to Defend

Nobody will confuse me with John Simon or Bill Safire. I am not any kind of absolutist, for example, when it comes to arbitrary grammatical rules. I think pendants who insist that people writing in English shouldn’t split infinitives are cranks. When Churchill says that ending sentences with a preposition is “something up with which we should not put” I agree with the contextual and not the literal meaning.

But I hate it when people misuse “beg the question.” Hate hate hate. And I actually thinks there’s a pragmatic justification. I ignore the two rules above because (as Churchill noted) they often make writing worse, and they have no good reason to exist in English. But the misuse of “begging the question” 1)confuses the meaning of an important concept that is most elegantly expressed using the phrase, and 2)as many of the luminaries commenting on Dr. Holbo’s post have noted, “raising the question” is a better alternative. So I have no intention whatsoever of ceasing to be a crackpot with respect to this issue.