Brother, Can You Raise a Question?

I’m begging you, please.

Every editor has his quirks. I’ve picked up plenty over 30 years.

To mention just one: advocate. The verb to advocate means “to support or argue for (a cause, policy, etc.): to plead in favor of . . .”

Unless, for some reason, you advocate against brushing and flossing daily, “advocate for” is redundant. “Bob the Dentist advocates a robust daily brushing and flossing regimen” is a perfectly acceptable construction. Substitute any proper noun and just about any recommendation, “life hack,” rule, ordinance, bylaw, cause, crusade, or concern and the sentence will work just fine. No “for” required.

Yet I do not consider myself a prescriptivist in language. Well, maybe a little. Not a lot. (I prescribe the judicious use of italics for emphasis.)

At bottom and above all, I advocate clarity over jargon, academese, and irrationally exuberant eccentricity. Rules should not be so stringent as to disallow a good turn of phrase. I disagree with Winston Churchill—or whoever the hell first said it—that ending a sentence with a preposition is “the sort of English up with which I will not put.” And I deny utterly that contractions should never be used “unless you’re dead,” as one former boss memorably admonished.

Anyway, I’m not a maniac or a Frenchman. I’m an American, with all that entails.

But some lines should never be crossed. Never, ever. Not even if you’re dead.

“Begs the question” has been a hobby horse of mine for more than 20 years. To “beg the question” is to engage in a logical fallacy. “Begging the question” assumes the truth of a premise without evidence. For example, just because the eggs are in a nest does not mean what emerges from them are birds. “This begs the question” is not another way of saying, emphatically, “This raises the question.” So fanatical have I been in battling this corruption that I once cut “this begs the question” from an essay by my own editor. He scratched out my edit, then noted and underscored: “No, this is the correct usage.”

He was right. Duly noted, sir. Duly noted.

Nevertheless, you see it all the time, and you probably don’t even notice it anymore. I saw it just yesterday in an article I edited for publication. “This begs the question . . . ” No, it does not, dammit!

What really set me off was a post late Monday by Chris Bray, one of my favorite writers on Substack. Bray is not the sinner here, nor, I suspect, could he ever be. You should subscribe and read everything he writes.

Bray’s hook, however, was a column by Matthew Fleischer, “a longtime journalist, the editor of the opinion pages at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a recent victim of a COVID-19 infection.” Fleischer wrote:

This begs the question: if an antiviral drug like Paxlovid exists that could potentially ease people’s COVID symptoms by preventing the virus from replicating in our bodies before it spreads, why are we being so precious about who we give it to?

Setting aside the merits of Fleischer’s argument and Bray’s commentary on it, I could not let the phrasing go:

Forgive me for donning my pedant cap, but Fleischer is a hack. He writes: "This begs the question..." NO. No questions have been begged! Questions have been raised! "Begging the question" is when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion. In other words, a circular argument. People use "beg the question" as a substitute for "raise the question" to, I guess, sound more erudite. NO. Don't do it.

Now, my comment itself raises the question: Is Fleischer a proper hack, or did he simply err? Or, as one commenter asked: “A ‘hack’ for misusing a commonly misused term?” Perhaps I was unduly harsh, but I’m a proud man, so I’ll stand by the vilification. Happily, Fleischer survived the dreaded virus, so he remains in a position in which to learn and grow. In any event, an editor has an obligation to know better. My best and worst editor flogged me for years over the use of clichés. We are supposed to adopt, adapt, and improve, always. What’s true of a humble scribbler in the mountains of Southern California is equally true of the opinion editor of a once-mighty metropolitan daily newspaper.

Another commenter, echoing Merriam-Webster, wisely counsels flexibility. “Common usage often changes such phrases,” which is true—and perfectly acceptable as long as style does not subvert clarity or meaning. However:

There's a segment of the population that would be enormously relieved if phrases like a question that begs an answer replaced the usual begs the question uses. These are people who think using beg the question to mean ‘to cause someone to ask a specified question as a reaction or response’ is completely and thoroughly wrong. There are probably more of these people than you think, and they are judging the rest of us.

I am one of them.

(Also: don’t get me started on “There’s.”)

“Evolution” of language implies addition, growth, or that terribly loaded word, progress. “This begs the question” takes a useful term in the language of logic and denudes it of meaning and worth. That strongly suggests a devolution of language. “Begs the question” is dumb pretending to be smart. It is a subtraction from, not an addition to, the English language.

This is a losing battle, obviously. But if you care about rigor and clarity—and the goal must always be clarity—you will care about this. Aiming for precision in language is not so much a science as a craft. At its highest level, it’s an art. The dynamic may be ever-changing but some principles remain fixed. Color outside the lines, but not too far. Be smart. Raise questions. But, for God’s sake, don’t beg them.