Erudite biases: Begging the question

The Chicago Manual of Style has opened the door to allowing "they," "them," and "their" as gender-neutral third-person singular and plural references (e.g. "Everyone opened their book")--thus letting it catch up with the everyday grammar of my Midwestern roots.

Until recently this was universally regarded as substandard, and not everyone is comfortable with it yet, nor is it appropriate for every occasion. In fact, even the CMS, ruling it fair game in its 14th edition, has had misgivings in the 15th--but I consider this the same as taking your finger off the checker: you can't take the move back. I still think the best solution is often to rewrite the sentence to obviate the problem; the second best is to explore "his or her" options, and the least desirable is "him/her" constructions--but "they/them/their" is now in-bounds.

This is one of several rules for which many of us got our knuckles rapped in school, holdovers from the days when the standards of Latin grammar were the benchmark. Relaxing them allows careful writers greater control over shades of meaning, and makes it easier to avoid clunky, graceless sentences. Finally, it can often allow prose to better catch the structure and cadences of standard American English. So--with appropriate considerations for context and writer's ear--"they/them/their" is fair game.

But I'm not ready to buy into the "conventional usage has long since changed--deal with it" argument regarding the common misusage of "begging the question."

The argument for acceptance in the latter case isn't so much the unwise pursuit of Latinist purity, it's simply the belief that, if enough people do something wrong long enough, it becomes right.

I don't think that rule applies to entire expressions in quite the same way it does to conventions of grammar. There's no argument about regionalisms, dialect, etc. (as with they/their/them), that supports changing "begs"--only the appeal that many people liked the highfalutin sound of the phrase enough to want to use it, but not enough to bother learning what it meant.

I don't really feel much pressure to hop on board that train.

And I suppose in the back of my mind is the argument, a la Orwell, that when you've lost the ability to express a distinction, you're well on the way to losing the distinction itself. How much easier would it have been to force Bush's Social Security phase-out plans to a standstill, for example, if more people were comfortably familiar with the idea that hiding your conclusion among your premises is usually a sign of either sloppy or dishonest thinking--in part because they still had a common phrase that handily expressed the idea?

So one can argue that this makes me a snob--or worse, I suppose, a philosopher. But the only plea I'm willing to cop to is being a preserver of distinctions.