--- Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote: > This strikes me as very very evil - there's a phrase that has a > unique useful meaning ("making a fallacious argument by assuming the > conclusion") not easily expressed otherwise, with a long pedigree > from a phrase ("petitio principii" - "requesting the start" or something) > one sees on occasion; and there's a meaning which can be easily > expressed idiomatically otherwise ("raises the question", "suggests", > "leads to", "brings up", ...) - and people are stomping the former with > the latter. At some point we prescriptivists may have to give up on this > phrase but it will mean a loss of current expressivity and a loss of > comprehensibility of texts. BRAVO, SIR!! My hat's off to you. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com