I am not alone: Beg The Question has a concise explanation of why it is absolutely not fucking acceptable to use beg the question when you mean raise the question, handy cards to print out and hand over to those guilty of abusing the phrase and even a range of t-shirts promoting proper use.

Thank you, Brownpau, for your campaigning zeal.

It turns out that some cultures, including the Aymara, an Amerindian people who live in the Andes of Northern Chile, use the reverse of our English temporal metaphors.

…the researcher asks a woman to explain the origins of her culture. She starts by describing her parents’ generation, then her grandparents’, and so on, extending her arm further and further in front of her as she does so. Then she switches to talk about how the values of those earlier generations have been handed back to her (her hand gradually returns to her body from out front), and how she will in turn pass them on to her children (she thumbs over her shoulder).

This makes sense, perhaps more so than the prevailing tendency to look forward to the future. If we are using ourselves as a marker to represent the present, then the future is indeed behind us, in the sense that we cannot see it, while the past stretches out in front of us, with recent events right before our eyes, and the distant past, all misty, on the horizon.

Rafael Núñez, the cognitive scientist studying the Aymara, suspects that their ‘reverse’ metaphors are the result of a grammatical peculiarity.

Núñez thinks that the reason the Aymara think they way they do might be connected with the importance they accord vision. Every language has a system of markers which forces the speaker to pay attention to some aspects of the information being conveyed and not others. French emphasises the gender of an object (sa voiture , son livre), English the gender of the subject (his car, her book). Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”

Fascinating stuff. Too fascinating, in fact - I’ve wasted way too much, erm, time, wondering whether time is an ontological entity or conceptual framework, whether it’s an a priori deal, Kant-style, or part of a weird four dimensional block of post-Einstein spacetime, or even a load of bollocks, as suggested by J.M.E. McTaggart, who came up with a rather lovely lot of nonsense that, roughly, dismisses time in the same way that Zeno of Elea was uncertain of motion. And now this? I’ll be sitting here watching my brain ooze out of my ears for the next wee while, then. (Unless the Submit Response philosopher-in-chief, Leon, clears it all up in the comments.)

The German word Umlaut means roughly sound change, being composed of um- (a prefix often used with verbs involving “change”) and Laut, meaning “sound”.

Via, kinda, the always-splendid New Things weblog, which points to the Wikipedia Unusual Articles page.

Talking of playing records, or sound changing, I’ll be contributing to a Stet radio show, featuring a mix and some form of interview with myself and DJ Maggie Jones about the club on Subcity Radio. People living in Glasgow can tune in to 87.7 on the FM dial, others may click through to the Subcity website and access streaming audio in the MP3 and, rather wonderfully, Ogg Vorbis formats. The show is tentatively scheduled to air on the 10th of February - the time is as yet unconfirmed, so I’ll update as soon as I know more details.

The music I contribute will probably explore Machine Windrush territory - that’s a really stupid genre neologism I coined just this minute, since a lot of the records I play these days are, rhythmically speaking, Jamaican-born, and made in the UK, on computers and other machines. A possible, arguably more euphonious, alternative term: Tilbury Digital. (For those wondering what on earth I’m wittering about, this page might clear things up.)

Until today, I would have used quiddity to express that concept, which is a troublesome word, because, while it shares a meaning with haecceity, it is also roughly synonymous with words like cavil, nicety, quibble or trifle.

It always seemed very strange to me, that a word could refer to the essential is-ness of something, while its own essential is-ness was muddied by multiple meanings. Or, to put it another way, the quiddity of this or that is the answer to the question quid est? - what is it? - but when you ask that question of quiddity itself, the answer dents the concept of quiddity (as in haecceity), since the word means both haecceity and quibble, meanings that are, in a sense, contradictory. Though, of course, in another sense, since quiddity can never aspire to autologicality, perhaps its awkward pseudo-heterologicality could be seen as a comment on the possible impossibility of haecceity.

Sorry, I lost myself there, let alone anyone reading.

Whatever, haecceity trumps quiddity for me, from now on in. I just hope it’s a concept I’ll genuinely need to express sometime soon, as it’s not really the sort of thing you can casually drop into everyday conversation, or even everyday writing. And I’m just bursting to.

A lot of nonsense is talked about ‘proper’ English being a means of endorsing the existing social status quo. My feeling is that the opposite is true. If you encourage people to write the way they talk, class divisions are ultimately reinforced, even exacerbated. I’m a working-class girl who read a lot of books and grew up to - well, to write this piece in The Telegraph anyway, so maybe I have an old-fashioned view of education as the instrument of social mobility. But it’s pretty clear to anyone that, if children are taught that ‘getting the gist’ is sufficient, everyone stays where they are.

Truss then goes on to quote Bill Cosby, who pulls fewer punches:

Civil rights campaigners marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we’ve got these knuckleheads who can’t speak English.

You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.

This argument is, I think, particularly pertinent to writing on the web.

I’m fairly familiar with l33tsP34k, or the txt msg vwl mnglng style, but if I happen upon a website written in either of these variations on English, I’m liable to close my browser tab quicker than you can type, ‘C u l8r m8!!!’ And, as a result, I could be missing out on profound observations, useful information, deep spiritual truths, etc. Okay, so it’s not that likely that I am missing out on anything more than teenage drivel and exciting new cheats for computer games I’ve never heard of, but still, there is much out on the web that I might want to read, but cannot, because it only purports to be in my mother tongue. As for future readers, I fear new university departments will be created to develop translation algorithms capable of untangling past language distortions, just as boffins are now having to spend time translating obsolete languages and file formats from the earlier years of computing and the internet.

Similarly, on a certain online forum which must remain nameless, I sometimes pretend to be appalled by the fact that many of the Scottish members insist on writing in dialect - cannae for cannot, and so forth - when they ought really to be speaking bloody English. In this case, being an Englishman in Glasgow, I’m obviously on shaky ground, and engaging in a little low-level trolling. But my point is valid: the web is a medium for communication, its great strength is the ability to connect people and their ideas; and by writing in psuedo-Scots any point made is buried under a deafening shout of, ‘I am Scottish and working class, you effete English arsehole!’ Or, to put it more politely, the strength of the web is weakened the moment people choose to ghettoise themselves by adopting an exclusionary argot. (The phrase exclusionary argot runs dangerously close to being self-descriptive, I know, but we’ll just gloss over that for now!)

So, looking at the web, the point made by the unlikely alliance of Truss and Cosby holds true. By writing ‘proper’ English (or, given the language war du nos jours, ‘proper’ Portugese) on the web, you build a place that is open to all, from stuffy old word-lickers like me to unfettered pre-teen l33tsP34kers. Call me a hippy if you like, but I thought the whole sodding point of the World Wide Web was to create a shiny new democratic space, one where class, nationality, colour, creed and whatever else people use to cut themselves off from other sections of society are stripped away to an extent impossible in the good old real world, leaving only the free and happy exchange of information and ideas. Like, y’know, and shit, man.

It’s not every day an application pays you a compliment, but that’s what it felt like when I checked to see how many mails I had to read today, only to find Mail fluttering its eyelashes and proclaiming my 1337 status.

Yes, I know I need to get around to deleting all those unread messages. And maybe organising my Inbox in some way or another might be a good idea too. It’s just that I can’t be b0tH3r3D.

There are two bands in Glasgow pioneering the trend: Uncle John & Whitelock, and Sons and Daughters.

The former are, for my money, the best rock ‘n’ roll band in the city since V-Twin. They make filthy swamp music, and write a mean lyric (Where’s your wife? She’s on the sunbed). Their debut EP was a beautiful thing to behold too, being a ten inch packaged in a hand-sewn sleeve, with the look of a lost classic 78, dusted off and reclaimed. To deploy the cliched formula, UJ&W are like Captain Beefheart, The Dirty Three and a preacher from the Deep South… on Benylin.

Sons & Daughters, meanwhile, are about to get rather well known rather quickly - at one recent gig the A&R men and label lawyers practically outnumbered ordinary punters, and regular plugs in the press from Franz Ferdinand can’t hurt, nor can their close connections to Arab Strap. Not that they don’t deserve it: when playing live, they make fabulous hillbilly stomp music with folky tinges; real riotous stuff, but delicate too at times. As a further clue to their sound, I hear Scott Patterson (guitar and vocals, and a fully trained dentist, fact fans) sees it as his job to bridge the gap between Bo Diddley and Bill Callahan - a laudable aim, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So, yeah, if you’re thinking of starting a group, be sure to get an ‘And’ in your name. I would suggest Polly & The Syndetons, if the pun wasn’t so dreadful

One - although I was half asleep at the time and can’t be completely sure - seemed to come from the mouth of John Humphrys who, as a noted champion of Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the popular paean to linguistic pedantry, should bloody well know better.

Much as I would love to give in to the temptation to run amok with an axe in Broadcasting House, it is probably better to explain why this drives me into a frothing homicidal rage.

Begging the question - otherwise known as Petitio Principii, or the deductive fallacy of circularity, or the fallacy of presumption - is not a hard concept to grasp, but a slightly tricky one to explain: in short, one begs the question when one cites as a premise that which assumes the conclusion to be true. For example:

A is true because B is true, and B is true because A is true.

Or, with a dash of complexity:

X is true because Y is true, and Y is true because Z is true, and Z is true because X is true.

So, if someone responds to a question you have asked with an answer that prompts a further question, it is absolutely not fucking correct to gibber, “Well, that rather begs the question…” as a means of introducing your secondary inquiry. What you ought really to say is, “Well, that rather raises the question…”

Okay?

Good.

Any errors of style, grammar, punctuation or spelling you may find in the above are, of course, wholly deliberate.