&gt; Begging the question. I do not think it means what you think it means.<p>The transitive use &quot;begs the question <i>X</i>&quot; (where <i>X</i> is some actual question) is commonly used that way and well-understood (and this usage is, while idiomatic in structure, fairly obvious from the usual definitions of the words involved.)<p>This is readily distinguished from the <i>intransitive</i> use &quot;begging the question&quot; or &quot;begs the question&quot; to refer to the <i>petitio principii</i> fallacy (an idiom based in what was, at the time, a poor translation into English that hasn&#x27;t gotten better with age.)<p>Even better, the intransitive use can be seen as (though this reverses the etymology) a special case of the transitive use in which the question begged is the original one the argument sought to address -- the justification for the conclusion which has been assumed in the <i>petitio principii</i> fallacy -- so that the transitive use that you complain about both <i>generalizes</i> the special intransitive case <i>and</i> rationalizes it with common usage.