Item — HN Reader

You are wrong.

>Nobody uses it with that meaning anymore, the phrase has taken on a different meaning.

I hear it used in its original meaning as often as I hear it being used in the other way. Losing the original meaning would be a bad thing, because it describes something that is difficult to describe, whereas 'asks me to ask this following question" is just a wordy, empty transition when usually the entire phrase should be replaced with "so."

>[So,] just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

better?

1 comments

It's trivial to statistically demonstrate that the new meaning is used far in favor of the old meaning - in language that's all that matters.

You can do this experiment yourself. You will find that the new meaning is so common, so prevalent, that you'll be hard pressed to actually find an example of the old meaning in usage beyond correcting somebody using it in the new meaning.

It's not a zero-sum game. New meaning for words and phrases don't wipe out old meanings. That's why dictionaries developed this novel technique where they list alternate definitions for words -- because all of the definitions are valid because words and phrases can have more than one meaning.

when usually the entire phrase should be replaced with "so."

I don't disagree that "so" is a more concise transition. But it can get old fast when it's used all the time. It may even be better to just ask the question with no lead in at all.

I disagree that "it begs the question" categorically doesn't have a meaning beyond the one coined from a poor translation from a Latin translation of Aristotle's original Greek. Insisting that it can only mean the logical fallacy is ignorant on several kinds of levels and only shows how little the prescriptivist knows about the phrase and how language works in general. You'll find that most aren't even aware that the English phrase we use is not even a correct translation from the Latin and the Latin is not correctly translated from the Greek! It's like a perfect storm of compounded ignoramuses.