Well, I suppose that went okay. Helen Razer called a bit after 10am, and we chewed the fat for a bit on my richly varied history before getting the recording going. The interview was just a few minutes long, in which I talked about what begging the question really means, the meaning of the original Latin phrase petitio principii, and why I started BegTheQuestion.info. It got a bit rambling at times, and my explanations of the term may have been a bit off. I also mentioned a couple of other pet peeves: “wait on/from” and “different than/from”, though these seem to be more American usage quirks with which the Australian audience would be less familiar.

There was a bit of a cage stage atmosphere to the conversation, so I may have come across as more strident about “BTQ Abuse” than I really am in real life; but I did point out that my whole purpose in starting the site was pure whimsy on an April Fool’s Day. In truth, whether or not BegTheQuestion.info actually helps lessen the erroneous vernacular usage of the phrase is of less concern to me than the Adsense and Cafepress income I get from the site. Hee.

I came in rather late for choir practice because of the timing, and when I told our choir director about it, he told me that he’d been taught that “beg the question” meant “beat a dead horse” — figuratively, that is. Someone who kept coming back to the same premise again and again was “begging the question.” There’s another “evolved” usage of the phrase to add to the vernacular definition, I suppose.

Oh yeah, buy the shirts!