[WAYYY OT] Begs the question

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 23:13 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 10:34 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> >    "That begs the question, why do they think it has a basis?"
> 
> 
> Or, if you want a less wordy answer:
> 
> The words "That begs the question" are not part of the question that's
> being asked (why do they think it has a basis?).  The question has to be
> written all by its lonesome.

Even more OT: since we're talking about English grammar and orthography,
there are certain errors that tend to crop up on this list (and on
others of course), to wit:

1) This looks like an error?
2) How do I do this.

Sadly, they are often committed by those who would seem to be native
English speakers. People, informality is fine and I have no problem with
it, but a question in written English has to be grammatically structured
as a question and not a statement (error 1) and *must* conclude with a
'?' (error 2). Neither of these is optional, e.g. you can't convert a
statement to a question merely by sticking a '?' on the end. So the
correct forms of the above would be:

1) Does this look like an error?
2) How do I do this?

Just thought I'd get that off my chest :-)

poc