Comment by jdoliner

It is kind of funny that "beg the question" is a turn of phrase prescriptivists and descriptivists are fighting over. The phrase originally comes from a mistranslation of the Latin petitio principii which itself was a mistranslation of the original Greek which approximately meant "assuming the conclusion." The original mistranslation is unfortunate because, at least to me, the more recent meaning of basically another way of saying "raises the question" actually makes a lot more sense.