Every synonym is not a synonym in every context, though.

It’ll never stop sounding stupid.

http://begthequestion.info

Is that really what we want? I shudder to think…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_%28publishing%29

I just personally like to think that where we can help it, it might be nice to encourage thoughtful and elegant evolution in our language, rather than leaving it to the meddlings of the barbarian hordes.

I’m no line-drawer.  The language wasn’t particularly richer when I started using it than it has become today, so I don’t insist we cling to the language of the 70s Because I Say So, or Because That Was The Pinnacle Of The English Language.  That would be missing the point anyway.

“Begs the question” is like the good china; what’s the point of storing something that you only use once per year?

Some people use the good china once a year, some use it every Sunday, some only eat off paper plates.  I own a compression gauge that I haven’t stuck into a spark plug hole in probably eighteen months; does that mean I have no need for one, and should just stick my finger in the hole to measure cylinder compression?  My vocabulary is much like my literal toolbox.  I add to it as need be, neglect to maintain it at my peril, and ever-so-rarely discard tools I know I’ll never have occasion to use.  (I’m a packrat, so what?)  I’m not that much of a purist.  I’ll use a 13mm wrench in place of a 1/2 inch one if I have to (or even if the 1/2 inch one is a couple of uncomfortable inches beyond my reach in some circumstances), and I’m liable to fall back on the 70s trailer-park patois of my youth in most conversations rather than adhere too closely to Betty Windsor’s English, but I’m still not about to use a screwdriver as a chisel (or vice versa), nor am I willing to deliberately use a specialized term for a purpose for which I deem it ill-suited.

Donald Petersen, you’re embracing wrongness

And consorting with folly!

And I’m perfectly aware that language and acceptable terminology can change dramatically (or at least noticeably) within a shortish lifetime.  I remember widely-accepted and previously-thought-respectable usages from my not-all-that-long-ago youth, such as Oriental, brontosaur, starfish, sabre-tooth tiger, tubular, stewardess, etc.  These terms were altered or abandoned for various reasons, such as inaccuracy, sexism, inelegance, or what-have-you.

But the changes in language to which you refer arise from slang, informality, imprecision, and ignorance.  And there’s a reason why we expect a certain amount of popular consensus when it comes to our shared language; that’s why we have dictionaries, and that’s why we don’t just assign any random definition we like to every word we use.  I’ll dust off an old argument I trotted out a couple of weeks ago.

Hey, it’s a free world, more or less. Use your words any way you like. But if you happen to forget the word “green” and you want to evoke the color that results when you mix blue and yellow paint, and you think it might be “red,” so you look up “red” in the dictionary, do you not hope that the dictionary will tell you whether red includes, among its common definitions, that hue acquired when you mix blue and yellow paint? And if it doesn’t, should you just use “red” anyway since it sounds right to you, and you’ll just hope people get what color you mean by your context and voice inflections? And when you tell someone to keep driving forward at the “red” light (by which you mean a green one), and that someone gets themselves killed in a traffic accident, might you not reflect on how you kinda wish you’d listened to Merriam-Webster after all? 

/hyperbole

This illustrates the extent to which there can be “wrongness” in language and usage.  You can use words “wrongly” by employing slang, such as using the word “bad” to connote something’s good qualities.  And you can use words in an unorthodox manner, especially when speaking informally or metaphorically or poetically.  Such usages are what make communication so vibrant and delightful.
But communication fails when words are used “wrongly” to a degree that interferes with understanding.  When someone misuses a word in a manner that someone else understands in the intended context, then the misuse becomes a successful communication.  Enough of these successful misuses eventually stop being misuses, and yes, the language has evolved.

But I disagree that we’ve reached that point yet when it comes to “begging the question,” “literally,” and “disinterested.”  Right now, the majority of appearances of those terms before my eyes are proper usages, though the tide does seem to be turning.  I disagree that the “mainstream definition” of those terms has changed yet.  And to this very day, the instances I see where these terms get misused are usually at the hands (or lips) of the young and unsophisticated.  And I know this is an awfully elitist attitude for me to hold (particularly since I hold no academic credential fancier than my high school diploma), and it would be pretty easy to discount my opinions solely based upon my propensity to crassly split infinitives and to stick seventeen parenthetical remarks into every paragraph, but I suspect I’ll be an unbowed prescriptivist until they nail me into a box.

If enough people use “disinterested” as a synonym for “uninterested” so that the unique legal definition of “disinterest” exists only in the heads of antique powdered-wig lawyers, then that’s a net loss for the language.  ”Literally” is prevented from succumbing to the fate of “really” as being merely an intensifier of metaphor rather than being used solely in cases where it’s important that a phrase not be mistaken for a hyperbolic metaphor, simply because there’s really (even “actually”) no alternative word to get that point across nearly as well as “literally” does.  Similarly, if “disinterested” is usually used to denote a lack of curiosity or conscious interest, as opposed to a lack of financial or partisan interest (or otherwise “having a dog in the fight” of some sort), then what word would we adopt to succinctly show that an arbiter (for example) is sufficiently neutral because she doesn’t benefit in any way if one party wins the dispute over another?

If one says that something begs the question of something else, sure, we have another way of saying so by utilizing a construction that refers to circular reasoning.  But right now the correct usage of “begs the question” is proper and specific, so why should the educated writer abandon it to the unlettered nincompoops who happily try on every ten-dollar phrase they come across without paying for it by learning what it actually means?  If people would really try to use language with a degree of care and precision and–heaven help us–art, then misunderstandings will become rarer, useful (if somewhat esoteric) usages will be preserved for their special-occasion use (like Grandma’s fine china), and the evolution of our language might proceed in a guided, cultivated fashion, rather than as haphazard, dystopic chaos.

Then dear old Bob’s quote about how if there was a mile-long cigarette that was lit when he woke up, he’d puff on it until bedtime, then poor little Alfie is unable to sleep, just like me.

Because this isn’t like debating the mass of a rock, the English language has no objective, measurable existence independent of how people use it… it IS how people use it, and, it seems, we’re using it THIS way now.   You can argue in favor of us not using it that way, but you can’t say we’re wrong for doing so. 

Unless you manage to convince us to redefine the word ‘wrong’, too.  But then you’re really on our side.

And that’s a Very Important Distinction.

Same thing when it comes to people like David Haglund who love to defend the misuse of “literally.”  Just because wrongness becomes fashionable doesn’t mean we should embrace it.  Leave it to our illiterate offspring to do that.

X-Files (an 1995 episode): I guess this begs the question; if this is an alien autopsy… (where’s the alien is the next line).

It was also used that way in the 1995 movie “The American President”

So yeah, maybe it’s relatively recent… but that’s still 17 years ago.  About half my life.  And I’ve personally seen it most of my life used that way conversation, and I’m sure there were more uses in TV and movies, just not particularly quotable lines. 

(And, I just found subzin.com which also has the following:

Bull Durham (1988): “Begging the question, what are these boys thinking about?”

South (1920!!): “for that begs the question, who is taking the film of him?”

The War of 1812: Causes and Consequences, 1783-1818 (1967): Well, it still begs the question: where the hell is he?

- Joey Tribiani