THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT BEGS THE QUESTION

posted by James Reel

Misused terms seem to come in little epidemics. This week, in the course of filling in again as editor of the Tucson Weekly, I’ve seen three writers get “begs the question” wrong, and online I’ve seen two highly questionable uses of “lumpen.” (At least I was recently pleasantly surprised to hear someone say “immensity” instead of misappropriating, as is common, “enormity.”)

“Beg the question,” according to a site devoted exclusively to setting the matter straight,

is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place. A simple example would be "I think he is unattractive because he is ugly." The adjective "ugly" does not explain why the subject is "unattractive"—they virtually amount to the same subjective meaning, and the proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.

What people who misuse “begs the question” really mean is “raises the question.”

“Lumpen” tends to be misused by fairly erudite writers who ought to know better than to employ odd terms without looking them up. They seem to associate the word, perhaps, with “lumpy,” at least in a metaphorical way, but it’s a short form of “lumpenproletariat,” which one dictionary defines first as “Of or relating to dispossessed, often displaced people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified.” By extension, and especially as critic Robert Hughes loves to use it, “lumpen” means “vulgar,” “common,” “plebeian.”

Class dismissed.