Re: Katie Couric Confirms Own Stupidity, Snobbery
Mike Findlay <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.music.dadl.ot |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
You guys made me go look it up just to be sure I was right about what it meant. I was. Mike F. (Whew!) ----- Original Message ---- From: nicholas a. evans <[email protected]> To: DADL (off topic) <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, October 28, 2010 4:18:06 PM Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Katie Couric Confirms Own Stupidity, Snobbery On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Johne Cook <[email protected]> wrote: > The more accurate word is 'ignorant.' ... > Being stupid means lacking ordinary quickness and keenness of mind; dull. It > suggests a person is not capable of getting such things right, even with > instruction. That's a very cynical view of people I don't hold. People may > be stubborn, but I don't for a moment think most people are stupid. :-) > See also 'begs > the question.' Everybody gets this wrong. Frankly, when somebody says 'that > begs the question' to mean 'that raises the question,' I understand what > they mean even if it isn't what they said. That's also a case of ignorance > rather than stupidity. In my case, it's stubborn impishness, just to annoy pedants. ;-) "Begs the question", in it's traditional sense, is a *bad* translation of the Latin, which was itself a translation of the Greek. The words are not easily contorted to mean what they're idiomatically supposed to. I'm all for sticking to the abused formal definition when it's *useful*, but this one just isn't. If you mean "assuming the initial point" or "reasoning circularly", just say it. On the other hand, most people intuitively understand it to mean "that begs [that] the question [be asked]" or "that begs the question [to present itself]". Yes, these are also contorted, but I'll gladly use them to hasten the demise of the "correct" meaning. ;-) -- Nick linguistic terrorist -- dadl-ot mailing list http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot -- dadl-ot mailing list http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot