Am I a Pedant?
Morgan Evans asks, “But that begs the question, what is funny?”
Except, that it doesn’t beg the question. As our dear friend the all-wise and powerful Jiminy Wales says:
Begging the question (or petitio principii, “assuming the initial point”) is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proven is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise.
I understand that this is a small, and stupid, pet peeve of mine. As noted in the wikipedia article on Begging the question, linguist Mark Liberman recommends avoiding the phrase entirely … its intended meaning is unintelligible and therefore it is now “such a confusing way to say it that only a few pedants understand the phrase.”
I am perhaps a pedant. But as Mark Corrigan would say, “You’re not a pedo.”
