On 1/4/06, Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote: > > This point was a bit humorous - look up "begging the question", e.g. > in wikipedia. > Ah, prescription versus description. An ancient argument. I am in favor of dropping the phrase entirely, since it is on the one hand misused, and on the other, misunderstood. Say "X raises the question" for the common usage, and "your argument assumes its own conclusions" for the "proper" usage. But I guess that's my own prescriptivism trying to deal with the problem by annihilating it.