nobegging

It is time, once and for all, oh my beloveds, to stop the madness in re: begging the question.

Or, perhaps:

It is time once and for all oh my beloveds to stop the madness in re: begging the question and to do so in a completely open manner using only the commas that have been deemed "necessary" we don't know by whom the sentence having been composed in the so-called open punctuation in some kind of perverse effort to make things easier very much at the expense of clarity.

Or did you understand that without the commas? Because they're not necessary, see?

"Begging the question" does NOT mean "asking the question." It just doesn't. Why would anyone, even the worst pedant ever, make up a special term for asking the question, "asking the question" itself being constantly and already available? I suppose, when you get right down to it, this is part of why this extremely common error drives us nuts here at the grammar underground. It drives us nuts because it implies that grammar is not for everyone, that it is hard to understand, and that it exists on a sort of rules-for-the-sake-of-rules kind of basis. In this sense, the misuse of this term functions in much the same way that the increasingly common decorative use of punctuation does.

"Begging the question" means deliberately circumventing the question, avoiding it by sneaky means, getting out of it using some kind of seemingly logical acrobatics, beating around its proverbial bush. It means precisely the opposite of asking the question, insofar, that is, as it means NOT asking the question, possibly on purpose.