Dear Reader (Including the people who need people),
Okay, bear with me. I think I’m going to write this whole thing as a single run-on sentence and then just add the punctuation later. I’ll just grab a fistful of commas, periods, and semicolons and blow them over the page like so much pixie dust or the last grains of coke on the album sleeve of Quadrophenia before Hunter Thompson started his workday. The gang at NRHQ can worry about putting them in the right place later.
As long-time readers know, from time to time I vent my spleen on the misuse of the phrase “begs the question.” Every day, someone on TV or radio gets it wrong. And it vexes me. I find it more distracting than when that guy who sat next to me when I took the SAT would absentmindedly tap his No. 2 pencil on his glass eye as he tried to work through the analogy section. I think it’s more annoying than the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz can’t rinse the conditioner out of her hair.
So for the umpteenth time, “begging the question” involves assuming a premise -- usually the premise in dispute ...
