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@cstross@wandering.shop
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@cstross@wandering.shop
RE: https://techhub.social/@rayckeith/115891885954410747 Also: you give someone free rein (as in, what you use to control horses), not free reign (that's what Donald Trump wants for himself).
Mathematician. Reader. Fiftysomething. Cruciverbalist. Not very good at thinking of witty things to put in short bios. I wasn't on Twitter before that nice Mr Musk suggested that everyone go to Mastodon, and I don't expect to be very active here, but who knows?
mathstodon.xyz
Mathematician. Reader. Fiftysomething. Cruciverbalist. Not very good at thinking of witty things to put in short bios. I wasn't on Twitter before that nice Mr Musk suggested that everyone go to Mastodon, and I don't expect to be very active here, but who knows?
mathstodon.xyz
@gjm@mathstodon.xyz
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Jan 14, 2026
@cstross@wandering.shop Seems to me that the things you get when hungry are both pangs and pains. "Pangs" is more traditional and a bit more specific, but "pains" isn't a _mistake_ in the way that e.g. "mute point" is.
I think there's literally (like, _literally_ literally_) no situation where using "begging the question" is a good idea other than when you know all the people you're talking to well enough to know how they will understand it. A lot of the problem here is that "begging the question" is a really unnatural way (in modern English) to say the thing it traditionally means, and rather a natural way (in modern English) to say the thing it often means nowadays, and both of those are things it's reasonable to want to say.
So I say something like "assumes what you're trying to prove" when I mean _petitio principii_, and "raises the question" when I mean the other thing.
(Sometimes I might say something like "begs the question, in the original sense": if I'm talking to people whom I know _know_ the original sense but there isn't enough common knowledge -- everyone knows that everyone knows, etc. -- that they can safely assume that I am using the words that way without further clarification.)
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