Gimme Shelter: Endgame for English?

Gather round, all tribal members of the Misanthropes, Cranks, Boors, Pedants, Malcontents, and Grouches. Please be seated. Is that everyone? Yes, you in the back, the Nitpickers, will you find a place? No whining! Sit!

The Reporter Institute of Language and Semantics (RILS) has, after a unanimous vote by its esteemed Board (sleep-deprived jerks) deemed the 2025 Phrase of the Year as: “Oh, my God, no!”

On to the first and only item on the agenda: The State of the Language in 2025. It was an exceptional year, one when that master of language, Donald Trump, discovered the words “groceries” and “affordability.” The year when our distinguished colleagues (weirdos, flakes, etc.) at Oxford University Press, taking a break from spitball fights and secretly sticking rude notes on the backs of their colleagues’ shirts, came up with their Word of the Year: “Rage bait.” Translated as, “Content created to deliberately incite anger and generate engagement online.”

Over at Cambridge University, the academicians, occasionally hallucinating from staring into screens for a living (journalists can relate), have decided that “Parasocial,” tops their list, which in English means “one-sided, often intense relationships fans form with celebrities or online personalities.” We here at RILS can only respond by noting: “The end is nigh.”

Merriam Webster, an actual person, a cranky lady, to put it mildly, has said her word of the  year is, “Slop.” Ms. Webster says it means “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” The lady continued: “Now, get out. Read a book, take a walk, do something productive.”

Again, at RILS, we ask — knowing we are pounding a drum that no one hears — if that supreme form of language, the narrative joke, will ever make its return. Humor now is visual, like everything else, or it’s snark, an animal Lewis Carroll invented and named in his poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” Can this possibly be the inspiration for our only form of laughter these days? No matter. Listen to this to see if it gives you a smile … or nausea.

Ready? Did you hear about the insomniac agnostic who suffers from dyslexia? Poor man was up all night wondering if there was a Dog.

Now, as we do each year at this time, we asked David Lozell Martin, the journalist, editor, best-selling author of a dozen novels, as well as one of the finest American memoirs, “Losing Everything,” to weigh in.

The language samurai — understand fully the Oxford comma around Ronin Martin if you value your head attached to your shoulders — will speak today of a serious misuse of the language we love. Mr. Martin, the floor is yours.

“For 29 years after the Second World War ended, Hiroo Onoda, a second lieutenant in the Japanese army, continued fighting. Living on wild game and rejecting information in the leaflets dropped on the island where he was stationed, Onoda refused to surrender.

“I also continue fighting a war that’s been lost. My battles are on behalf of the English language. 

“The beauty of our language is beheld in its precision. ‘Begging the question’ is an example of that precision. When an answer to a question assumes its conclusion is true rather than supporting that conclusion with reasoning or proof, then a form of circular argument is created. The same is true when the answer restates the premise of the question.

“I ask, ‘Why is McDonald’s so popular.’ You answer, ‘Millions of McDonald meals are sold daily.’ I ask, ‘Why does wine put me to sleep.’ You answer, ‘Wine is a soporific.’ I ask, ‘Why is capital punishment wrong?’ You answer, ‘Because it’s wrong to kill someone.’

“If someone tries to answer your question without providing any proof or reasoning, you could say, ‘Sir, your answer’s premise has assumed the truth of your answer’s conclusion, creating a petitio principii fallacy.’

“Or you could simply say, ‘Your answer begs the question.’

Yes, that’s what ‘begging the question’ means. It refers to a fallacy of logic. It is not a fancified way of saying that something raises a question. Yet, you hear commentators misusing ‘beg the question’ all the time, saying that a quarterback has been injured so ‘that begs the question,’ what happens to the team next year? Or: there’s been a failure of diplomacy so ‘that begs the question,’ will there be war?

“Instead of using ‘that raises the question,’ these commentators grab a language tool of great precision and swing it like a ball-peen hammer.

“But wait! You looked it up online and one of the official dictionary definitions for ‘begging the question’ is to raise or state an obvious question. Yes, I know: the war has been lost … lost through ignorance, a lack of proper education, and uninterest (not disinterest — look it up!) 

I must stop now. An airplane is dropping flyers full of official dictionary definitions that insist ‘literally’ can be used to mean ‘figuratively’ and other conditions of surrender. I once again reject them and head for my cave.”

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

And so, as 2025 slips away, remember some advice from James Joyce: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”