[ Re-edited to replace "descriptionist" with "descriptivist". --Jeff ]
Hi Bryan,
I have consulted _The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage_ (3rd and latest edition of this venerable work), to verify Newsweek’s claim. I regret to inform you that it seems to me that Fowler’s does indeed mention that this questionable usage of “beg the question” has become standard usage. What is standard usage? According to the linguistic descriptivists, of which Fowler’s editor, Robert Burchfield, is a leading exponent, standard usage is essentially common usage. According to these good folks, grammar and lexicon wait for no man to pronounce them legal, and no one has ever been able to hold them in stasis in order to “preserve” their current state of “excellence”. Burchfield, who by the way is the recent editor of the _Oxford English Dictionary_, Second Edition, and as such, ought to garner a certain degree of credibility, points out that even Samuel Johnson, around 1750, eventually came to realize that language is a dynamic phenomenon, and that even the French and their national academy were unable to halt the changes which necessarily must occur in any living language. It is that word “living” which is all important. To the descriptivist, this dynamism in language is a continual source of wonder and fascination.
In the complilation of the “New Fowler’s”, many thousands of citations from current language sources were collected, and computerized. This database provided scientific evidence supporting the book’s findings. Dr. Burchfield evidently found enough evidence to convince him that this new usage of “beg the question” had become standard.
Rather than bemoan the “corruption” of this particular idiom, we might try to keep in mind that many of the words and expressions we use today are “corruptions” of their previous forms or meanings. Nearly all the words we employ today have evolved from earlier forms, and in the process acquired new or sloughed off old meanings. Burchfield in all his linguistic wisdom, has assured us, in his preface to Fowler’s, that our beloved native tongue is quite healthy, and will undoubtedly withstand the onslaught of the unprecedented change it is currently undergoing, as it keeps pace with the needs of the people to express new ideas, and becomes ever more efficient in doing so. As for “beg the question”, we will just have to adjust to the fact that this collocation now seems to have acquired more than one sense, and that the audience is no longer at liberty to beg the question, what is meant by its use? The audience has a responsibility to interpret it correctly, assuming that the context offers enough clues as to which sense is implied, while the communicator is responsible for providing the necessary clues to insure correct interpretation. In practice, this is almost always unconscious.
