On: Fun with Magic

[markdown]

> raises the question

FTFY

[phaemon → markdown]

Outside of the Internet, every single time I have every seen "begs the question" used, it means "raises the question". TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, common speech. Every single time. Therefore, that's what the phrase means.

I have no idea where this American obsession with tying it to a technical term for a fallacy comes from, but I wish it would stop. It's as though every time someone referred to a ram, whether a male sheep or a battering ram, they were informed that "RAM means Random Access Memory. You're using it wrong."

[schoen → phaemon]

Since the sense referring to the fallacy is the original one and the non-fallacy sense is the innovation, your analogy about "ram" isn't ideal.

[joshuapants → phaemon]

Language prescriptivism is hardly an American innovation