"Begs the question" is widely understood to mean the same thing as "raises the question" in common usage, and complaining about it is one of the sillier prescriptivist hills to die on.
The older meaning is obscure, largely redundant, and doesn't really make any sense etymologically, so it's not really surprising that the newer meaning caught on.
(And since we're being pedantic, it's got nothing to do with grammar.)
> In modern vernacular usage, "to beg the question" is frequently[citation needed] used to mean "to invite the question" (as in "This begs the question of whether...") or "to dodge a question"
That's just useless. And you know, saying "it once was A, now it's B, so it can never be A again" is exactly as "prescriptivist".
Little things add up, and before you know it people are just stringing words together as demonstrated on a million youtube videos.
> The older meaning is obscure, largely redundant
How so? How is the "new one" (which one? heh) not redundant? If you want to say something raises a question, that's an easy way to put it right there. On the other hand, I'm not even convinced that the bastardization of "begs the question" into "raises the question" wasn't simply based on not even understanding what assuming an initial point even could be, of just hearing the phrase without understanding the context and using it as another way to say something or someone raises a question. I certainly don't hear it in common usage, regardless of the phrasing used. You know, if all those other people say they just say it because "most" people do, then none of them actually do have a reason. A billion times zero is zero.
And don't even get me started on people suddenly calling low framerates "lag" :P It just destroys information, and you can call it progress because the hands on the clock moved a little, but I won't.
>saying "it once was A, now it's B, so it can never be A again" is exactly as "prescriptivist".
Except I'm not telling you what you can say, I'm telling you what other people do say, which is descriptivist. You can use meaning A if you want to, but don't expect people to understand you.
>You know, if all those other people say they just say it because "most" people do, then none of them actually do have a reason.
That's like saying no one in the US has a reason to speak English, they're doing it just because everyone else does.
Language is about shared understanding, so most people around you using a particular meaning is pretty much the only reason for someone to use it.
When the comment says "understood", read it as "fluently understood". And again, "begging the question" has nothing to do with grammar, so there's no reason to sass by making grammatical errors.
Begging (for) the question is a correct literal usage of those words, under both prescriptivist and descriptivist definitions of the words. You're allowed to use the same sequence of words as an idiom in other ways. I can talk about a hot potato without metaphor, and I can talk about begging a question when not describing a fallacy.
