#13557
12/20/2000 4:30 PM
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Hi Group,
I have a burning peeve that I must post here as part of my ongoing campaign to eradicate it.
I hear in conversation, and on television and radio, from ones who ought to know better, misuse of the term "begging the question."
It is the name for a logical fallacy in which the truth of the conclusion is assumed by the premises. A simple example:
"I am not lying, so it follows that I am telling the truth."
Begging the question does not--I repeat--does NOT refer to a question which "begs to be asked," as I hear more and more in common usage. Let's all vow to not succumb to this improper usage and to shoot it down in every instance.
Ah, I feel much better now.
Thanks!
m.
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#13558
12/20/2000 4:33 PM
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Agree totally -- it drives me to a pitch of fury. But the previous thread on this topic was so long I thought there was some hope for us logicians yet.
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#13559
12/20/2000 4:44 PM
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Well good luck trying to change anything that takes hold on TV and radio. As you must know, much of the perversion of the language can be traced there. Ever since the evil day, now nearly 40 years ago, when a commercial went on TV that said, "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should," the distinction between like and as has been very blurry for the average person (not people like ourselves, of course) (smirking emoticon). Then there is another of my pet peeves, a construction like "She invited Jane and I." I could go on ad nauseam and no doubt others on this board will have more examples, but you may as well abandon hope. Once one of these atrocities gets on the air, people think they are correct (must be, since someone said it on TV or radio) and repeat it, so others repeat it, etc.
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#13560
12/20/2000 4:58 PM
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>but you may as well abandon hope<
Would that I could! Hope, my friend, refuses to abandon me.
m.
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#13561
12/20/2000 6:11 PM
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>Would that I could! Hope, my friend, refuses to abandon me. Bring her on. She sounds like the steadfast type we want here 
TEd
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#13562
12/21/2000 12:45 AM
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addict
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addict
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… and what about her mates Faith and Charity!
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#13563
12/21/2000 12:30 PM
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Bobyoungbalt : you may as well abandon hope. Once one of these atrocities gets on the air, people think they are correct (must be, since someone said it on TV or radio) and repeat it, so others repeat it, etc.
Bob! There is light at the end of the tunnel and it's the light of knowledge . Our local supermarket recently underwent renovation and, lo and behold, above several "quick check out" areas appeared the sign : "ten items or fewer ! Hurrah! Now, if we can just get management to change the words on the staff vests to May I help you.
Small steps, small steps...
wow
wow
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#13564
12/21/2000 12:54 PM
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> appeared the sign : "ten items or fewer !
Gotta disagree here. The English for this is "ten items or less".
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#13565
12/21/2000 1:37 PM
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misuse of the term "begging the question."...a logical fallacy in which the truth of the conclusion is assumed by the premises
If the logicians were so logical they should have called it "Assuming the Conclusion" instead of giving it a name that doesn't describe it so well.
What? Petitio Principii? Gimme a break!
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#13566
12/21/2000 3:37 PM
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>What? Petitio Principii? Gimme a break!<
May the break you ask for be given you.
;-)
m.
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#13567
12/21/2000 3:43 PM
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>>What? Petitio Principii? Gimme a break!<
>May the break you ask for be given you.
isn't that begging the question?
-joe (I'm so confused) friday
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#13568
12/21/2000 3:52 PM
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I hasve a friend who's an FBI agent here in Denver. The other day there was a bank robbery, witnessed by a panhandler who was sitting on the street corner cadging quarters. Joe spent the whole afternoon questioning the beggar.
TEd
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#13569
12/21/2000 4:46 PM
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Perhaps Faldage is right. "Begging the question" is so unclear, and petitio principii is in another language, for goshsakes! I think we ALL deserve a break from complex or obscure terms which require any effort to understand.
Take "hydrogen peroxide" for instance. How complex and obscure! Why don't we all agree just to call it "bubbly stuff." That's much more logical. And foreign words like "Champagne" don't tell us anything about what the stuff is like. Let's call it "bubbly stuff" too.
And just so we don't get them confused, let's call hydrogen peroxide "bubbly stuff for cuts" and call Champagne "bubbly stuff for parties."
Whew, isn't that better? Now, I've gotta turn off this box that has light coming out of it and get down to that big building where they teach people stuff.
Later,
m.
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#13570
12/21/2000 5:14 PM
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Metameta notes: And foreign words like "Champagne" don't tell us anything about what the stuff is like. Let's call it "bubbly stuff" too
What do you think most of the population of New Zealand call it? Especially with the French getting uppity about what is and isn't champagne, whether "methode champagnoise" and "methode traditionelle" are also breaching the brand and what have you. "Bubbly". A new brand!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#13571
12/21/2000 8:25 PM
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Pooh-Bah
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>"Bubbly"
The term used here these days seems to be "fizz" - posh fizz, cheap fizz, it's all fizz.
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#13572
12/21/2000 8:46 PM
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old hand
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> appeared the sign : "ten items or fewer !
Gotta disagree here. The English for this is "ten items or less".
Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "disagree", but fewer is indeed correct. Fewer refers to the number of somethings, while less refers to the amount of something. Basically, less is singular, fewer is plural.
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#13573
12/22/2000 8:23 AM
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That's what I disagree with. In normal English we say two is less than three, someone with ten apples has got less than someone with twelve, and so on. No count/mass distinction is made with 'more', which functions as comparative of both 'much' and 'many'. The relatively rare word 'fewer' just strikes me as a pedants' revival, an artificial and unnatural distinction gleaned out of some obsolete grammar.
The only notion of "correct" that holds water is "what native speakers naturally say".
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#13574
12/22/2000 11:12 AM
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To my surprise I find the OED cites less examples than I'd expected. Normally these fictitious rules were routinely broken by people like Dickens, but there are no examples for several centuries before his period.
The first use of less in sense 1.c., as a synonym of fewer, is from King Alfred's translation of Boëthius:
Swa mid læs worda swa mid ma
where it's originally an adverb governing the partitive genitive worda.
Then Caxton wrote By cause he had so grete plente of men of hys owne countre, he called the fewer and lasse to counseyll of the noble men of the Cyte.
Then Lyly wrote in Euphues that I thinke there are few Vniuersities that have lesse faultes than Oxford, many that have more.
(And no I'm not putting forward Lyly as an arbiter of elegance.)
Then there are only modern quotations, second half of last century onward; and it looks as if it first got into print in mathematical writing, where naturally you don't want to pronounce the relation in a < b differently depending on what the entities being compared are.
The OED says the synonymy with fewer is 'Freq. found but generally regarded as incorrect'.
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#13575
12/22/2000 3:06 PM
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To my surprise I find the OED cites less examples than I'd expected.
See, using "less" there is absolutely wrong. It just sounds wrong. You're talking about the number of examples and therefore "fewer" is correct.
I ran that sentence through the Lotus Word Pro grammar check and this was the result:
These rules flag errors of mass/count agreement. An error in mass/count agreement is a conflict between the number of the noun (singular or plural) and the adjectives before the noun that tell how much or how many. For example, one rule in this set will flag a sentence like 'There are less mistakes in this document,' because the adjective 'fewer', not 'less', is the correct one to use with a plural noun.
A lot of what we talk about on this board are commonly misunderstood grammar rules. This is one example. Just because it's commonly misused doesn't make it right.
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#13576
12/22/2000 5:35 PM
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JazzO sez: using "less" there is absolutely wrong
What it boils down to is whether the native speaker of the language sees any meaningful difference between the situation in which what is being talked about is measurable and that in which it is countable. If the speaker sees no such difference then it makes no sense to use a different word in one instance than in the other. Less is easier to say than fewer and therefore is preferable to the native speaker.
There are many rules that used to be used, e.g., separate verb endings for each person and number, use of a different pronouns for plural and singular in the second and even different forms of the pronouns for nominative (now usually called subjective) and dative/accusative (now usually called objective) in the second person plural (it's not who do you trust or whom do you trust, it's whom do ye* trust). All these rules were forgotten because they were seen as being unnecessary. I regret the loss of meaningful distinctions such as the difference between virulent and virile or enormity and enormousness but I refuse to mourn the loss of a distinction between less and fewer.
Show me a case where there could be a misunderstanding based on the violation of this rule and I may recant.
*Ænigma doesn't even recognize ye.
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#13577
12/22/2000 5:59 PM
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Faldage wept: *Ænigma doesn't even recognize ye.I hope you're not therefore implying, based on what you said earlier in the same post, that AEnigma can therefore be considered to be a native speaker of English!  I would say "There is less sand on the beach this year", but "There are fewer oranges on the plate". To me, "less" is used for an indefinable quantity. "Fewer" is used for something which you can enumerate (or would be able to if you needed to). Also note that I use the plural form of "to be" with "fewer". I'm not trying to say that I'm right and that's that, just pointing out how I was taught to use them.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#13578
12/22/2000 6:17 PM
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My at-work dictionary has a use note: "Traditionally few and fewer are used only before a plural noun few books; fewer people and less is used before a mass noun (less sugar)."
This is best exemplified in the story about the minister of this small church in rural Florida who discovered that an addition to his family had strapped beyond repair the ability of his flock to keep him and his family in food. So he looked around for a job, and ended up at the local orange grove. The owner of the orange grove was impressed with his common sense and his ability to follow instructions, and hired him to sort through the oranges to find only the very very best, which would be sent to the White House for use in making orange juice for the President and his family. His job was to take only the top one percent of all the oranges.
A couple of weeks after he started work one of his flock came to the orange grove and was a bit perplexed. "Reverend," said the churchgoer, "I thought you were out doing the Lord's work."
"And I am," responded the preacher, "For did we not learn that truly, many are culled but few are squozen?"
Of course this doesn't at all exemplify the difference between few and less, but it did give me a chance to tell one of my favorite stories.
TEd
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#13579
12/22/2000 7:56 PM
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Yes, yes, yes! (to Faldage and his discourse on the rules..)
Who own English? The hoi polloi in the universities– the writers of grammar books? The high and mighty of the OED?
Or we, the humble speakers– with all our faults? The answer is clear to me.
I own English! And like Shakespeare, I reserve the right to make up words– if there is no word for an idea of mine, well there should be.. Who out there is less than Shakespeare? Was he not a man? Would he be as revered if he has just stuck to the common words, and common phrases, and had not enriched English as he has done?
You own English– Please be my guest and do your best to make your thoughts known, and if there is no word -yet-for what you are thinking– then think up a new one!
Its not that I don't value all the existing words, but I don't see today's lexis as- it- something carved in stone – and to be fair, the high and mighty of the OED agree with me, or why else a new edition? If all the words that to are to be-were then we wouldn't need to be asked and we have been, by the OED, to follow on Dr. Major's footsteps, and provide material for the new OED.
and if i can make up words, why can't i make the rules up too?
Yes- it chaos-- glorious chaos.. moving into math and bordering on philosophy-- chaos is the best place to be. it's were change is still happening-- where things are more like living creatures..
languages die when the rules are more important than the speakers..
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#13580
12/22/2000 8:35 PM
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The language is reinvented every generation. We learn more about grammar between the ages of zero and three than we ever will in any school and we don't even know we are doing it.
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#13581
12/27/2000 10:56 PM
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old hand
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Yes- it chaos-- glorious chaos..
Sure, sure, but if you go lax on the basic core rules of our language, the skeleton that gives it recognizable form and flavor, then if a few generations people will be saying "me is good". Are you then going to accept this?
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#13582
12/28/2000 12:55 AM
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I have to agree with almost all that's been said in this thread. The speakers of any language own it - even where, as with the Academie Francais, there is an officially-sanctioned attempt to control it. It can't be otherwise. Lexicographers and grammarians, with the notable exception of Fowler, try to codify the current usage of English. They don't try to direct at all. I've never seen any credible attempt since Noah Webster's little revolution to actually impose one route or another on its direction. Perhaps, though, we are more in need of a generally accepted base standard for the language than ever. I don't say this through any misguided belief that what I think is right and wrong is what should become the standard, but because the desperate need for clarity of communication between speakers of the same language who come from different cultures. I am a member of an international organisation which meets two or three times a year, with one representative from each of thirteen different countries. The one language we "share" is English, so all proceedings are carried out in English. The standard of the different representatives' English varies greatly. The constant complaint is that there is no "accepted" English language standard for them to follow, and I spend a good deal of time at those meetings helping representatives with the language in their reports. None of this is a criticism. It's just a fact of life!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#13583
12/28/2000 4:40 PM
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There actually is a sort of controlling body which keeps a language relatively stable without the grammar deteriorating and as free of slang as possible. This body is made up of all the good nuns who have been smacking hands of students, the elementary school teachers who initiate the process and the middle- and highschool teachers who carry it forward, and the college level instructors who fine tune to the utmost level. Sadly, there are few nuns in education any more and the standards in public schools, as well as in many colleges & universities, keep falling all the time. All of us who care about the language need to keep up the pressure on local school boards or other governing bodies, and on any institutions of which we may be alumni/alumnae or on which we may have any influence, to keep standards up.
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#13584
12/28/2000 6:26 PM
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BYB spoke about applying pressure on educational authorities to keep standards up. The problem is, at least in New Zealand, that when I talk about "standards" I mean one thing. When others talk about standards, they may mean something else entirely ... 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#13585
12/28/2000 7:15 PM
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JazzO says: but if you go lax on the basic core rules of our language then i[n] a few generations people will be saying "me is good"
Two points: The basic core rules of our language have been almost completley overturned in the last thousand years. The language was one, like Latin, in which relationships between words were indicated primarily by inflectional endings on the words. Adjectives agreed with their nouns in case, number and gender and it was through inflectional endings that these agreements were expressed. We have almost completely lost this feature of the language for nouns and have lost it completely for adjectives. The reputed exception of blond/blonde is sometimes mentioned as an example of the continued use of the gender rule but I doubt if you could honestly document this. If you were to examine the common usage you would probably find that the two spellings are randomly used with no regard to the gender (or even sex) of the noun (or referent of the noun) being modified.
Pronouns are fast falling. The form you was the dative/accusative form; ye was the nominative. When we say you are good (singular, i.e., thou art good) we are, for all practical purposes, saying me is good. I have even heard an elementary school teacher saying, between you and I. It is my belief that we are in an unstable period in which we are dropping all pretense of using case differences in any part of the language.
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#13586
12/28/2000 8:46 PM
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How much does this distress us? Are we our language's keeper? (I'm leaning toward Faldage's point, yet shudder at the French Academy)
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#13587
12/28/2000 9:08 PM
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I flinch when I hear things like Give it to Tom and I or between you and I and probably more than I do things like Me and him went bowling last night, if only because it seems to be the better educated that commit the former transgressions. But we've been dumping this case structure thing for the last eight hundred years or so. We've only got a few of these things left and there's no point in trying desperately to hold on to them.
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#13588
12/29/2000 5:55 PM
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Can someone do me a favor and use begging the question in a sentence. I really have no idea how you would use this phrase as I have never heard it before.
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#13589
12/29/2000 6:28 PM
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belMarduk asks someone to use begging the question in a sentence.
OK, let's try: You say he's a liar so we can't believe him when he says anything because it must be a lie. That's begging the question.
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#13590
12/29/2000 10:23 PM
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the phrase actually comes from another sense of the word beg; that is to take for granted without warrant -- here are a couple of citations: This was to assert or beg the thing in Question. Many say it is begging the point in dispute. The vulgar equivalent for petitio principii is begging the question.
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#13591
01/02/2001 10:56 AM
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My at-work dictionary has a use note: "Traditionally few and fewer are used only before a plural noun few books; fewer people and less is used before a mass noun (less sugar)."
Not so traditionally. Let's see what God has to say about it. I haven't got this to hand to quote, and it's a bit long, but Fowler s.v. less notes that the word was formerly used very widely to mean 'smaller', 'minor', and so on (the greater light and the less, St James the Less), and the modern tendency is to use a more specific word: 'fewer', 'smaller', or whatever.
He does not mention the existence of a fetish "rule" that you have to use 'fewer'. Normally he vigorously attacks these fetish "rules". This suggests to me it's very recent, post-1930, or was very unimportant before then. All Fowler mildly says is that the use of 'fewer' rather than 'less' is the modern (c. 1930) tendency. Clearly, since then the tendency has foundered, since almost everyone says 'less' these days, and they have all through my life. I never heard of the fetish "rule" in school, though one or two of my teachers might have tried to force their pet fetishes on us. (One insisted that "human" wasn't a noun.)
There is a big difference between a real rule, learnt in infancy, such as plurality agreement or past tense formation, and a fictitious "rule" the existence of which surprises fluent adult speakers. Throwing out the fetishes doesn't change any of the real grammar of English.
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#13592
01/02/2001 5:28 PM
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NicholasW asserts: There is a big difference between a real rule, learnt in infancy, such as plurality agreement or past tense formation, and a fictitious "rule" the existence of which surprises fluent adult speakers. Throwing out the fetishes doesn't change any of the real grammar of English.Not so fast with the "fetish" tag, please. My usage of less and fewer was learned from infancy. No teacher I had during my early schooling would have known enough to try imposing such a formation on an unsuspecting pupil population. My parents probably had their fetishes and ju-jus, but I don't think the usage of less and fewer would have crossed their minds as being one of them! 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#13593
01/02/2001 7:10 PM
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basic core rules
I've been giving some thought to the very polite argument going on here (not at all polite in other venues) over language changes. It is certainly the case that grammatical features like case are mostly gone and I agree that it doesn't matter a whole lot, since modern English is a distributive language (one depending on word order and placement), not the inflected language that Old English was and Middle English partly was. A sentence like, "Me come too" sounds like something a two-year-old would say; but even if, over the course of another 100 years or so, this should become standard usage, it's meaning is clear even if it's expression is inelegant. So I'm not upset so much by changes as long as a given usage is clear and unambiguous.
What really concerns me is that what we are seeing now is the institutionalization of usages which creep in out of ignorance and illiterate usage; viz., the indiscriminate confusion of lie/lay, infer/imply, and too many others to list. The result is a decrease in precision and clarity in the language. The reason English has more words than any other language is that most of them (not all, of course) have precise meanings which are different from all other words. If we keep on allowing the ignorant and lazy to stop recognizing the differences between certain words and make synomyms indiscriminately, by the start of the next millenium, if humans are still around and speaking English, they'll have to do it with the assistance of their hands, like the Italians, because one word may have 50+ different meanings because all the words with a single or limited number of precise meanings have disappeared.
While I'm on this hobbyhorse, let me also deprecate the vanishing use of the semicolon. We now have sentences with members of a series and subseries all strung out with commas because semicolons are now politically incorrect, thanks to the incessant whining, over the last 30 years, of the ignoramuses (ignorami and/or ignoramae?) who can't or won't take the trouble to learn how to use the semicolon.
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#13594
01/03/2001 2:22 AM
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NicholasW says: There is a big difference between a real rule, learnt in infancy,... and a fictitious "rule"...
CapK responds: My usage of less and fewer was learned from infancy
I think that the usages that we find objectionable are the ones that violate the rules we learned at our mother's knees. For example, my father used the word irregardless frequently with, I think, humorous intent. In a similar vein the only time I ever heard may used instead of can in the manner drummed into our tiny little heads by our grammar school teachers (e.g., Can I stay up and watch TV? May you stay up and watch TV and the answer is No!) was in the children's game which we knew as Mother May I
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#13595
01/03/2001 2:48 AM
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
Faldage suggested that: I think that the usages that we find objectionable are the ones that violate the rules we learned at our mother's knees. For example, my father used the word irregardless frequently with, I think, humorous intent. In a similar vein the only time I ever heard may used instead of can in the manner drummed into our tiny little heads by our grammar school teachers Setting aside the shocking way in which you jump to conclusions regarding the sex of the primary parent, I find myself agreeing with this entirely. Probably because I did learn the "can I/may I rule" at my (grand)mother's knee, or at least at her dinner table. So, as one proud to have been raised by a devoted single father, I do proclaim that you may be excused for your lax attitude toward the misuse of "can."
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#13596
01/03/2001 7:45 AM
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
.. because one word may have 50+ different meanings because all the words with a single or limited number of precise meanings have disappeared.On closer inspection, I wonder if it is possible to count the number of meanings of an isolated word! A word only acquires its full and unique meaning in context. Even a single complete sentence is a somewhat lossy vehicle for conveying a given message. Words that are used most frequently (like hold, stand, right..)tend to have the widest range of meanings! And if we limit ourselves to words with fewer meanings, those will also have less meaning or, if any, then to fewer people . By the way I wonder where you acquired the conviction that "English has more words than any other language"? In my opinion, what makes English an "advanced" languange is its ability to express a wide range of meanings by combining a relatively small number of words.
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