sapientia
Recent verbal/grammatical pet peeves:
– Madonna lyric: "Don’t underestimate my point of view." This is from her song "Cherish," one of her early hits, I believe. Heard it over the P.A. system in a store recently. The grammatical construction is tenuous at best. I mean, does one’s point of view have value that can be something besides either true or false, valid or invalid? I guess there are points of view that lends themselves better to perceiving the situation at hand as it truly is, but I still don’t think of them as able to be over- or underestimated. The word just seems to intersect the sentence at a right angle, like a container sticking out of the fridge, keeping you from fully closing the door.
– "It begs the question…" Okay, this is a big one, and difficult to explain. There’s a logical fallacy called "begging the question," which means, basically, to assume or anticipate a particular answer in the formulation of a question. However, in 90% of the instances where I see the phrase used, it has absolutely no connection to the logical fallacy, but seems to be simply used to mean something like, "the question that naturally follows from the preceding statement is…" It’s a tip-off to me that the writer probably has little, if any, awareness of logical pitfalls, since the fallacy mentioned above is a pretty basic one, and is using the phase in a misguided attempt to sound more intelligent. Or it could just be that language is changing to accommodate the new meaning (kind of like how "eager" is being replaced by "anxious"), which is, to put it mildly, unfortunate. Preserve the richness of the language, people!