I heard ‘begging the question’ being misused (again!) on talkback radio. But let’s not blame the poor old broadcasters – almost everyone gets this wrong. It is regularly and consistently misused. Sometimes people say this when what they meant is ‘it raises the question’ and at other times they seem to mean ‘it avoids, or dodges, the question’. Both of those uses are false. Used correctly ‘begging the question’ is the name of a logical fallacy, of taking for granted or assuming the thing that you are setting out to prove – in other words, a circular argument. Philosophers call this logical fallacy petitio principii. Because it is so widely misunderstood and misused my advice is to never use it. Never say ‘that begs the question’. Rather say ‘that raises the question’ if that’s what you mean or ‘that dodges the question’ if that’s your meaning.

Why do we say that something that’s the best of its kind is the ‘bee’s knees’? This slang expression was born in America in the 1920s and revived in the 1970s. Attempting to explain it some people have said that when bees climb inside the cup of a flower, pollen sticks to their bodies. The bees then carefully comb this off and transfer it to pollen sacks on their back legs. The expression the bee’s knees is said to refer to the delicate way bees bend their knees when performing this operation. It’s a nice story – but like so many nice stories, it’s simply not true. The (rather plainer) truth is that popular language loves rhymes. And the ‘bee’s knees’ was simply an amusing rhyme – coined as such by American newspaper columnist and cartoonist T.A. Dorgan (known as ‘Tad’ Dorgan) who lived from 1877 to 1929. His verbal inventiveness was just the ‘bee’s knees’! The knowledgeable Michael Quinion (on his Worldwide Words website) published a list of these animal slang terms from the 1920s. Here are some of them: the elephant’s adenoids, the bullfrog’s beard, the caterpillar’s kimono, the duck’s nuts, the monkey’s eyebrows, the oyster’s earrings, the kipper’s knickers, and the eel’s ankle. And there were many others. It was a relatively short-lived frivolous slang fashion and only a few of these expressions have survived, of which ‘bee’s knees’ is the best known. Tad Dorgan, by the way, has one other claim to fame – he coined the expression ‘hot dog’. The story is that he drew a cartoon which showed a hot dog bun, but inside the bun instead of a saveloy, was a dachshund (one of those little German ‘sausage dogs’). But when he came to write the caption he realised he didn’t know how to spell ‘dachshund’, so he wrote ‘hot dog’ instead. At least, that’s the story!

Geoff is annoyed by people who use the indefinite article ‘an’ incorrectly, and he asks me to put them all straight. Geoff, I have to warn, that they won’t listen – but I’ll try anyway. Geoff’s big bugbear is with people who say ‘an historic event’ or ‘an historian’. To stop him tearing his hair out, here is the explanation. The rule is that we use ‘a’ before any word that begins with a consonant sound, and ‘an’ before an initial vowel sound. So ‘honour’ begins with ‘h’ but spoken aloud it starts with a vowel sound – so it takes ‘an’ as its indefinite article. But words such as historic, or historian, or hotel definitely start with a consonant sound. Admittedly it is the soft aspirant consonant ‘h’ – but it is a consonant, nevertheless. It is correct to say ‘a historic’ and incorrect to say, ‘an historic’. Pam Peters in her definitive style guide discusses this and says there should not be a problem as long as you take care to pronounce the ‘h’ sound carefully.