Petitio Principii

This blog used the word entreaty last week. Why entreaty rather than ask or request or inquire or plead or beg or implore? What is the difference between these words? Most of these words are both verbs and nouns; plead is the verb form of plea, and beg and implore are only used as verbs.

As often is the case, the differences can be instructive. Beg has a sense of powerlessness that plea does not, although both can be strong words. Request, ask, and entreat are not as obvious.

Ask means to put a question to, or inquire about. It is the most innocuous of the words in this spectrum. Ask comes from an Old English word, acsian, that had the same meaning. According to etymonline.com the acsian “would have evolved by normal sound changes into ash,  [or] esh, which was a Midlands and southwestern England dialect form. [The] modern dialectal ax is as old as Old English acsian and was an accepted literary variant until c. 1600.”

Inquire means to seek information by asking. It seeks an answer to a question, where ask may know the potential answers but request a decision as to which one applies. Inquire came to English in the late 1200s from the Old French word enquerre, which came from the Vulgar Latin word inquaerere. Quaerere means inquire, while the in- prefix means into; so inquaerere means ask into.

Request has a sense of formality or politeness to it that ask and inquire do not. Request came to English first as a noun, in the mid-1300s, and was not used as an English verb until the 1530s. It came through Old French (requeste) and Vulgar Latin (requaesita)  from Latin (requesita) and meant “a think asked for.” The verb could have been formed from the noun or from Middle or Old French.

Plead has more emotion involved than ask, inquire, or request. It is defined as “to entreat earnestly.” Plea and plead both came to English in the 1200s, with the noun beating the verb by a few years. Both originally had only a legal sense (which is retained in English usage) and came from Anglo-French. The noun form came from the Old French word plait, a 9^th century word that meant lawsuit or decree. It came from the Medieval Latin word placitum, which in classical Latin meant opinion or decree, and literally meant “that which pleases, thing which is agreed upon.” Yes, the word please comes from the same Latin root word.  The sense of begging is first recorded in the late 1300s.

Beg usually means either to ask for charity or alms, or to implore or ask fervently. Beg also arrived in English in the 1200s, but its etymology is not clear. While there is an Old English word bedecian that meant “to beg” but apparently the more common Old English word for beg was wædlian, which was formed from the Old English word for poverty, wædl. There is a polite use of beg in the phrase “beg pardon,” usually a means of asking for forgiveness for a minor offense. It has been used in that sense since about 1600. More recent is the command to dogs to “beg” which has been used since 1816. One other phrase using the word beg is “to beg the question”, which is a literal translation of the Latin phrase “petitio principii.” Etymonline.com says the Latin “means ‘to assume something that hasn’t been proven as a basis of one’s argument,’ thus ‘asking’ one’s opponent to give something unearned, though more in the nature of taking it for granted without warrant.”

Implore has a sense of pity to it that the others don’t. It usually does not indicate the financial need that beg does. Implore arrived in English the latest of all these words, in about 1500. It came from the Middle French word implorer which came directly from the Latin word implorare, that meant “call for help”. It is formed from the prefix in- combined with plorare, which means to weep or cry out.

So, if asking does not work, be more polite and try requesting, but if you really need more information you may want to inquire. If it’s a legal matter or has some desperation about it you may want to plead, and if it’s not legal but desperate you can implore. If you’re financially pressed try begging. I beseech you.