Beg your pardon -- you're begging the question

Reading The Beacon, the Fall newsletter by local writer Julie Ferguson, I came across an interesting article by Joyce Gram, in which she discusses the evolving usage of the expression to beg the question. The original meaning, to argue in a circular fashion, or avoid the question, says Gram, is falling out of use.

Almost exclusively, she points out, younger people use this expression in quite different ways now, as meaning either to invite the question or to raise an obvious one.

When my parents argued, as they often did, from incommensurate premises, Dad would reproach Mom, "You beg the question." She frustrated him with her tendency to assume she was right, rather than logically examining her beliefs, as he felt she should.

In contemporary usage, any expression containing the word beg is automatically unfashionable--I beg your pardon is another case in point. But this this begs the question of accuracy. Are the new usages more or less accurate than the old? Neither, I think. Language moves on, and though most try, no generation can rein it in.

Recently, I was delighted to hear the expression to beg the question used in the original way by none other than Alexander McCall Smith’s fictional philosopher Isabel Dalhousie, in The Careful Use of Compliments (2007). I was listening to it in the car, as an audio book beautifully narrated by Davina Porter.

There’s a certain level of linguistic—what is it? muscle, perhaps—that develops with long years of faithful and attentive reading and writing. McCall Smith has that in spades, and it enables him to bring forward, not only the fading lore of W.H. Auden, Isabel Dalhousie's favourite poet, but many delectable linguistic constructions of earlier generations. To beg the question was definitely used in what Isabel calls "old Edinburgh."

The Ketchikan mother and the scream

Kids sometimes scream. These blood-curdling yells occur mostly in the context of play; after all, most kids have lively imaginations. To other ears, though, these careless screams can suggest something is seriously amiss.

One summer at the lake, I witnessed a scene that stopped me from ever again emitting another careless scream. (At least, until I was 19, and foolishly agreed to go along with university friends and ride the historic wooden roller coaster at the PNE.)

My brother and I played with a kid whose name we did not know, because we hadn't bothered to introduce ourselves. We thought of him as Ketchikan, because he was from that town in Alaska.

Like many other summer tourists, Ketchikan and his mother had come down to Prince Rupert on the Alaska Ferry in a camper, and then driven down to Lakelse Lake, where we were also staying.

We were playing some boisterous game, and my brother was chasing Ketchikan, who let out a blood-curdling scream.

His mother erupted from the camper and we all three froze as she ran toward us, hair flying.

"What's the matter?" Her face was filled with a wild concern.

"Nothing," said Ketchikan, "we're just playing." Then he made the mistake of laughing.

I've never seen anyone's expression change so fast. In an instant, the pallor of terror was replaced by the wildness of rage.

"Listen to me, Kenny," she said, biting off each word. (It seemed Kenny was his real name.) "Screaming is not funny. When you scream, I come running. If you have no good reason to be screaming, I'll be glad to give you one." Then she looked at my brother and me coldly, turned, and stomped away.

That was when I realized the effect screaming had on others, parents especially. And except for that one time on the roller coaster--and I really couldn't stop myself then--I never screamed again.

Snake-sitting summer

I've had some strange summer jobs. Probably the weirdest one of all was snake-sitting. It was a duty of obligation, not a paid position.

The pet owner snake was my brother's friend, and he'd caught the snake slithering through the grass down by the pony corral. Gavin opened the box, and I looked inside. The green garter snake was less than a foot long. I eyed it warily.

"What does it eat?" I asked.

"Hamburger," said Gavin, and then, when he saw my puzzled look, added "raw hamburger."

"You have to open it's mouth, like this, said Gavin gravely, and push in some hamburger, like this." He demonstrated and I shuddered.

"It's not nice to force feed it," I said. "What if it's not hungry?"

"Snakes have no teeth," explained Gavin kindly. His tone suggested he was speaking to a simpleton. "They have to swallow things whole."

Just like I have to swallow your stupid explanation whole, though it is probably wrong, I said to myself. I was about fourteen, a couple of years older than Gavin, and thought I knew a lot more than this kid. But I was working for his mother, as a groom in her riding stable. I loved this job, and I wanted to keep it. I thought I'd better be nice.

For the next two weeks I fed the snake raw hamburger, morning and night. When Gavin returned from Manitoba it was alive and well. But summer was drawing to a close, and he was getting bored with the snake. As undoubtedly the snake was getting bored with living in a shoebox and being force-fed raw hamburger.

"I think I'll set it free," Gavin said one morning. We both watched as he tipped the cardboard box down toward the grass. The snake slithered from the box and was gone in a flash of green. I was relieved to know that I'd fulfilled my duty and glad the snake had endured its captivity and was free again.

Dusk in the blackberry patch

In the space between busy highways, dikes and fences separate adjacent farmlands from the waterfowl refuge of the Serpentine Fen. The distant roar of traffic is still audible here in the wetlands, but the feeling is quiet and reflective.

Herons, ducks and geese fly in low formations, the sound of their wings audible before they splash down. The wooden footbridge gives a good view of the largest duck pond. The trail beside it is screened by tall grasses and cattails.

In the late summer dusk I pick some of the blackberries that flourish on their thorny briars, between the wildflowers and silken grasses that flank the trails.

Humans are not the only ones to eat from this profusion of fruit. At dusk, rabbits scamper beneath the bushes seeking their share, and the coyote scat by the trail is full of seeds.

An evening in the wild blackberry patch returns me to a quieter, more rural past, and the fragrant, juicy, sun-ripened fruit feeds body and soul.

Poison, or just fowsty?

One of my Mom's Newfie speech habits was the cavalier way in which she used the terrifying word poison. "Don't eat that old stuff," she might say, "it'll poison you."

In the early stages of my linguistic development, I lacked the concept of metaphor and equated poison with instant death. If I ate even a crumb of something before my mother advised against it as "poison," I was terrified I might drop dead at any moment. After surviving a number of expected "poisonings," it occurred to me to wonder if I might have misunderstood the word. One day I decided to ask for clarification.

"Mompy, would eating this moldy bread kill me?"

To my astonishment, my mother scoffed at the idea. "No, indeed, my dear," she said. "But it's no good." She wrinkled her nose and pointed to the blue patch. "See? It's fowsty."

Now I haven't heard that word since Mom passed away, and it may not be in the dictionary, but according to a facebook discussion, it's still around. The alternative spelling is fousty.

Can a door have scruples?

"Can you hear that noise?" I asked my daughter.

"Yes," she replied. "I've been hearing it all day. It sounds like something mooing."

"Mooing? Nothing that big, I hope. A bird, maybe?" I suggested.

"Yes, I see what you mean. Possibly a goose," she said.

I glanced at the open screen door and brightened.

"It's the screen door...squeaking." I stopped myself from using the word scruple; I'd learned long ago in elementary school that scruple is not a noise caused by lack of lubrication.

"There's that old door scrupling again," Mom would say. "I must get Dad to put some oil on it." But my teacher would have none of it. A scruple was not a noise, she explained; it meant hesitating to do something on ethical grounds.

I wanted to argue for my mother's Newfoundland usage, but the dictionary failed to back me up and I had to accept the embarrassment of having defended an idea that was wrong. At the same time, deep down, I believed in my mother. When I went home and asked her what a scruple was, she told me it was a squeaking noise made by wood or hinges.

It was a lovely word. Only I'd learned a regional usage which made no sense in BC. I don't think of it often, but Mom's use of the word has stayed with me. It sounds like it should be right.

When cell-free becomes fashionable again

Fashions have a way of coming full-circle. A craze passes and is replaced by its near-opposite. Will this happen with cell phones?

These rapidly proliferating devices represent a major technological advance, no question. Without a doubt, they provide convenience.

But let's face it, aside from those emergency calls, the way they're used is determined mainly by the dictates of fashion. And for those out of their teens, flashin' the phone is no longer in fashion.

It's already been written up in the business section of the paper. Allowing a ring tone to be heard or answering a cell call at a business lunch is very uncool. "Do turn off your mobile phone," states Darah Hansen in a recent article on dos and don'ts for business lunches in The Vancouver Sun.

The evolution in cell phone manners reminds me of the situation with televisions, when they first came out and everyone was glued to them. Well, not quite everyone. The more forward-looking, the less enslaved by fashion made up a joke that went like this:

"Do you have a television?"

"Of course. But we keep it out of sight, in a closed room."

The same could soon be said of cell phones. Have them, by all means. But except when needed, they should be kept in the purse or pocket, decently out of sight and mind.