(REUTERS/Brendan McDermid)
Perhaps more than any other Supreme Court justice, the late Antonin Scalia cared a great deal about language, often spending time carefully consulting several dictionaries and usage books. He took pains to use words precisely.
And if there's one phrase that exemplified his testy relationship with language — and by extension originalism, the issue for which Scalia was most controversial — it was "beg the question."
Misuse of the phrase was Scalia's biggest pet peeve.
According to a recent interview with Bryan A. Garner, a legal lexicographer and friend of Scalia, when anyone used anything but the traditional meaning of the phrase — circular reasoning — Scalia would insist that the phrase's original meaning was the only correct meaning.
What's circular reasoning?
As Garner notes in his new book, "Garner's Modern English Usage" — which Scalia had seen not long before he died — this is the strict, traditional meaning of "beg the question":
to base a conclusion on an assumption that is as much in need of proof or demonstration as the conclusion itself
The formal name for this logical fallacy, Garner writes, is "petitio principii," but in English it's often referred to as circular reasoning or circular argument. Garner gives some examples:
"Reasonable people are those who think and reason intelligently." (This statement begs the question. What does it mean to think and reason intelligently?)
"Life begins at conception, which is defined as the beginning of life." (This comment is patently circular.)
But a lot of people just don't use "beg the question" that way anymore, Garner told Business Insider. For many, today the phrase means "invite the follow-up question":
[T]he use of beg the question to mean raise another question is so ubiquitous that the new sense has been recognized by most dictionaries and sanctioned by descriptive observers of language. Still, though it is true that the new sense may be understood by most people, many will consider it slipshod.
In a recent discussion on CNN about Donald Trump, Hadley Heath Manning said [emphasis added]:
But it sort of begs the question: How can they control this? And isn't it really up to the voters as to whether they're going to stay with Trump or move away and try to find another Republican?
Given the nature of the Supreme Court's work, you could imagine how such "misusage" could get on Scalia's nerves day after day.
"He thought I was a little too soft on 'begging the question,'" Garner said. "He was insisting that 'begging the question' must always be about circular reasoning, but of course the empirical evidence is that very few people use it that way today."