Word Woman

Welcome to another wild and wonderful installment of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! This week's offering is dedicated to MPL's own Master of Ceremonies in charge of Socrates Cafe - a hotbed of philosophical debate which takes place on the last Thursday of each month:

Beg the question: Begging the question doesn't mean evading the question by giving an indirect answer, as is often assumed. The old phrase, which can be traced back to the 16th century, is the rough equivalent of the logician's 'petitio principii' and means 'to stack the cards in an argument by assuming something that hasn't been proved before the debate begins.' Beg the question actually means that someone is acting like a beggar, asking his opponent to concede the argument at the beginning. 'O shameless beggar, that craveth no less than the whole controversy to be given him!' an early English author wrote in explaining the term. -- "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins", Robert Hendrickson, Checkmark Books, 2000.

Example: The Master of Socrates Cafe often accuses the Word Woman of begging the question when the two of them are debating a topic.