beggars and other slayers of the English language

All right, my pretties…

Here we are with another installment of Diana the Grammar Goddess. Today, we’ll be discussing three common mutilations of the language I have sworn to uphold and protect.

1) A person’s interest is piqued, not peaked. Anyone who thinks otherwise should take a long walk off a high peak.

2) The phrase is a lot. Two words. You wouldn’t write alittle, would you?

3) And the most heinous and far-reaching of them all: begs the question When something begs the question, what it does is make a conclusion without even raising the question in the first place. In formal logic terms, what it is doing is “improperly taking for granted” the situation at hand. My philosophy prof. taught us to think of it as “beggars the question,” which isn’t quite correct, but got the job done. No one in my class misuses it to mean “raises the question” or “begs us to ask the question” or any of the other teeth-grating ways I’ve seen people use it recently.