Correction - unambiguously

@providencejim - Glad you liked the Stephen Fry video. I hope that what came across is that it is possible to love and enjoy using language without worrying unduly what other people do or say. You make some interesting points, so I’ll take them one by one, if I may.

1. uninterested / disinterested - I make the same distinction as you, but are we really sticking to ‘traditional’ use here? This is from the Online Etymological Dictionary entry for uninterested -

“1640s, ‘unbiased,’ .... It later meant "disinterested" (1660s); sense of ‘unconcerned, indifferent’ is recorded from 1771. This is the correct word for what often is miscalled disinterested”

In fact the distinction that you and I both make is relatively new - there’s more about it here - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/the-negative-canon-disinterested/

2. infer/imply - in ‘careful writing’ I also make the same distinction as you, but no doubt informally I might have come out with something like “Are you inferring I’m a liar” when I ‘should’ have said ‘implying’ - but given the context, is there likely to be any possibility of misunderstanding? I doubt it.

3. And my favourite: ‘begging the question’, which if you don’t mind I’ll link with ‘decimate’ and ‘hopefully’, as all three of these utterances are in fact very rarely used in the ways that the purists would have us reserve for them.

I used to be a ‘decimate snob’, but apart from reading about Roman military history, I think I’ve only once come across the word being used in its ‘reduce by a tenth’ sense, in a radio play about Cromwell’s New Model Army. And ‘hopefully’ is equally rarely used to mean ‘in a hopeful manner’.

Which brings us to ‘begging the question’. I know a little bit about this as I blogged about it fairly recently and did a bit of research before posting. This has in fact three possible meanings: the original logical fallacy, a nineteenth century variation meaning ‘to evade the question’, and its twentieth century sense of ‘raising the question’, although I would argue that ‘beg the question’ is a bit stronger, and that’s why it has proved popular.

I checked the first ten Google entries for ‘beg the question’ at four ‘quality’ news media sites, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The BBC and The New York Times, (ignoring those concerned with the use of the expression itself). Of forty entries, only three (all at the NYT) didn’t have the ‘raise the question’ meaning, and two of those were probably for ‘evade the issue’, one of which was from 1862! In fact outside discussions about the expression, you’d be hard put to find it its logical fallacy meaning anywhere. At the British National Corpus, out of 97 examples, I found only four that were ambiguously concerned with the logical fallacy.

But more importantly, just because a word or expression takes on a new meaning doesn’t mean the old meaning has to disappear, nor that there is inevitably confusion. The expression ‘beg the question’ is, for example, almost always used in a different way to express ‘raise the question’ than it is for the logical fallacy. When used in the former meaning it is almost always followed by the question it raises, often with ‘of’ - ‘This begs the question of where the money is going to come from’. But when used in its logical fallacy meaning, there is no ‘question’ to follow it, and it is usually used on its own or followed with ‘by’ as in these examples from the BNC’:

‘Sartre's 'singular universal', therefore, begs the question, for it is predicated on the ...’
‘This easy remark begs the question against the relevant argument’
‘The debate has been sterile because each side has begged the question by assuming itself to be correct.’

In fact the most likely confusion is between the logical fallacy and the ‘evade the issue’ meaning, exemplified by that last one, which I can’t really make up my mind about.

There is no reason why words and expressions can’t have a different meaning when used by specialists and in general use (I’ve talked about the different general and specific meanings of ‘Classical music’ on another thread). Logicians are intelligent chaps (and chapesses), and I’m sure they can tell the difference between one use and the other, and the same goes for military historians.

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/07/begging-question-why-all-fuss.html

@Over50guy - except that people don't do it consistently with 'I' and "me". Those of us who are happy to say informally "Me and Dave are off to the pub", will almost always say "David and I are going to the pub." in more formal contexts, when speaking to Dave's parents, perhaps. In actual usage - "I and David" is very rare, and I would say non-idiomatic. But equally, "Dave and me" is pretty uncommon, the more idiomatic expression is "Dave and me". I can't find it, but I've read somewhere that in a straw poll of students at one particular college, of those who found the use of 'me' acceptable in subject position in certain circumstances were more likely to put "me" first, by a ratio of about 8-1.

By the way, I always open doors for people.The trouble is that some people confuse formality with politeness.

Addendum - there's also one type of construction when we can even use past perfect for something that didn't happen *after* the main event - 'And having told him what she thought of him, she left the room before he'd had time to think of a suitable reply'

Well we've got three tenses (or forms if you prefer):

past perfect - 'hadn't rung' and '(hadn't) banged'
past simple - 'was'
past continuous - 'was leaning out'

The first thing to sort out is why we are using past perfect. This is often used to express a past event which happened before another past event - 'It was my first time in a big city and I'd never seen so much traffic before.'

But this is not the case here. The past perfect is being used here as the standard verb form of the if-clause of a past hypothetical conditional, what in TEFL/TESL we call a Third Conditional - 'If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'd never have believed it.'

And in this case the result clause (or main clause) is 'I wouldn’t have known anything about any of this'

Or to make it more like my example - 'If Olga hadn't rung our doorbell, I wouldn’t have known anything about this'

This is a case of 'unreal' past, where the tense used doesn't reflect the actual time, just as we use a past tense in a present (or future) hypothetical conditional (or Second Conditional) - 'If I got married I'd move into a bigger flat'.

But in this case the if-clause is further divided, with a main part - 'if Olga next door hadn't rung our doorbell and banged on the door' - and a time clause - 'just when Mami was too deep in prayer to hear and Maria was leaning out over the sill with her eyes bugging out'.

The important thing (as you mention) is that these past events are all happening at the same time, in the normal past. Olga banged on the door at the same time as mami was deep in prayer and Maria was leaning out of the window.

If the verbs in this time clause had also been in past perfect, it would have seemed as though these actions had happened before the main action (the standard use of past perfect), rather than at the same time. Incidentally, that sentence was another Third Conditional.

For example, if it had said:

'if Olga next door hadn't rung our doorbell and banged on the door just when Mami had been too deep in prayer to hear and Maria had been leaning out over the sill with her eyes bugging out' - it would sound as though mami had been deep in prayer earlier and as if Maria had been leaning out of the window some time before but was no longer doing so. In fact with 'just when' it wouldn't really make any sense in this context.

We can use a time clause with past perfect when it makes sense to do so. -

'Just as (or when) I'd got used to her strange ways, she upped sticks and left'- but here the action in the past perfect really did happen before that in the main clause. I got used to her strange ways and then she left.

Time clauses often don't take the same tense as the main clause, for example future time clauses are expressed with a present tense - I'll tell him when I see him', not 'I'll tell him when I will see him'.

Actually, I now see you pretty well answered your own question in your last sentence.

Correction - in the first paragraph it should read 'the teaching of English to people living in an English-speaking country whose first language isn't English' without a comma. And me a teacher, too!

@speedwell2 - just on a technical note, ESL (English as a Second Language) usually refers to the teaching of English to people living in an English-speaking country, whose first language isn't English, and so is the dominant form within the US.

What I do, however, is teach foreign learners in their own country, which in Britain, at least, is usually referred to EFL or TEFL ((Teaching) English as a Foreign Language), which is probably what most British teachers of English to non-native speakers do. And then there's the catch-all TESOL - Teaching English as a Second or Other Language.

And what about my position in Poland? I'm certainly not an immigrant, and 'Foreign National' sounds rather official to me. Within the foreign community, we often refer to ourselves as expats, but from the point of view of the Polish we are 'obcokrajowcy' - literally 'people from foreign countries'.

I would have no problem with Poles referring to me as a foreigner, and that's how I would sometimes refer to myself. Here's an example from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary - 'The fact that I was a foreigner was a big disadvantage.'. But I agree that when talking of other people it's probably better to use the adjective 'foreign' plus a noun - 'foreign student', 'foreign workers'.

For example, in Britain, terms like 'Afro-Caribbean' never really caught on, and we usually use 'black', but rather as an adjective than a noun. Here's the Guardian Style Guide - 'should be used only as an adjective when referring to race, ie not "blacks" but "black people" or whatever noun is appropriate'. Perhaps the same might be true of 'foreign'.

@providencejim - well, 'each to his ane (own)' as we say in Scotland. For me, whether something is natural idiomatic English weighs in more strongly than logical analysis. No doubt lots of our favourite expressions would fall by the wayside if we always took the approach.

As for preplanning, I agree it's over used, but again their are shades of planning. Some people like to plan their holidays well in advance, others prefer to do it at the last minute. I don't see a problem with having a word for planning something before it's strictly necessary, if it's used sparingly.

Some people similarly object to the word proactive, but to me it doesn't simply mean being active. A proactive approach has a sense of 'before' which simply being 'active' doesn't have, for me at least.

But preplanning and proactive are probably both business buzzwords, and these really are a matter of personal preference. To action or to impact something don't bother me, but the constant use of 'going forward', and the use of 'reach out' to simply mean contact grate a bit.

The answer is simple: if you don't like a word or expression, don't use it, but don't worry too much if other people do. Language is there for all of us to enjoy, not to get too worried about. I've referred to Stephen Fry's wonderful monologue on language before, but there's no harm in doing so again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY

Addendum - Looking at those examples again, I think 'simplistic' on its own sounds fine before a noun - 'a simplistic solution', but seems to be lacking something when used in predicative position after a linking verb - 'This solution is simplistic' - in that position it seems to be crying out for a 'too' or an 'over'.

Personally, I have no problem with 'over-simplistic'. Sure, simplistic already means that something has been oversimplified, but it doesn’t really tell us to what degree, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to grade it a bit, whether with ‘very’, ‘too’ or ‘over’.

In any case, it pretty well has idiomatic status now, which to my mind overrides tautology any day. - Its use in books has more or less quadrupled since the mid-70s, id Ngram is anything to go by:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=over-simplistic&year_start=1950&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

I think sometimes people can get a bit too het up about things like tautology and redundancy. The most important thing for me is - does it sound natural - and in this case I think the answer is yes.

That rather po-faced no-ifs-no-buts quote in the Free Dictionary was reprinted from the Collins Dictionary entry for 'simplistic', but there are at least some dictionaries which ignore its strictures as regards 'too':

'His interpretation of the figures is far too simplistic'. (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary)
'His interpretation of the theory was too simplistic.' (Merriam-Webster)

And in over 12% of its instances at the British National Corpus (a computerised collection of 'real-life' examples of language use in Britain) , 'simplistic' is accompanied by 'too'.

Oxford Concise has no qualms in its entry for 'over-simplistic' either, with no warning usage comments, and this example which takes the intensifying even further - 'a wildly over-simplistic song about what it takes to be happy'. Nor ironically does Collins in its own entry for 'oversimplistic' (their spelling).

And here are a few examples from academic writing at Google Books:

'having stated in an over-simplistic way how a balanced trinity …. guides my personal taste
'There were conceptions of reading and writing which were based on over-simplistic psychological models'
'However, such an approach seems to be over-simplistic because it raises some obvious concerns'

That last example in particular would sound strange to me without the 'over'.

In fact the Collins entry on 'simplistic' (and so the Free Dictionary) seem to be about the only places where there is any mention of a problem. Google 'over-simplistic' and there appears to be a complete lack of forum discussions or controversy.