Beg In its main function, to beg serves as an improved modern synonym for the old crave, which now sounds very affected. Both verbs mean to request earnestly and from a kind of subordinate position — one begs a favor but demands a right. Beseech and implore are close to beg, but both imply a little extra anxiety and/or urgency. The only really egregious way you can screw up with this word is to misuse the phrase beg the question. This phrase does not — repeat, not — mean “invite the following obvious question,” and sentences like “This begs the question, why are our elected leaders silent on this issue?” are both increasingly common and deeply wrong. The idiom beg the question is the compressed Anglicization of the Latin petitio principii, which is the name of a particular kind of logical fallacy in which one bases a conclusion on a premise that turns out to be just as debatable as the conclusion. Genuine examples of begging the question are “The death penalty is the proper punishment for murder because those who kill forfeit their own right to life” and “True wisdom is speaking and acting judiciously.” Because of its extremely specific origin and meaning, beg the question will never mean “invite the question” no matter how widespread the usage becomes. Nor, strictly speaking, will it mean “avoid or ignore the real issue,” even though a subsidiary def. of beg is “to dodge or evade.” If you want to accuse someone of missing the point, you can say “You’re begging the real issue” or something, but it’s not right to use even this sense of beg with question unless you are sure that you’re talking about a case of petitio principii.
Critique I went to college in the mid-1980s, and there I was taught that there’s no such verb as to critique. The profs. who hammered this into me (both over fifty) explained that to criticize meant “to judge the merits and defects of, to analyze, to evaluate” and that critique (n.) was the noun for “a specific critical commentary or review.” Now, though, the dictionary’s primary def. of to criticize is usually “to find fault with”; i.e., the verb has taken on increasingly negative connotations. Thus some usage authorities now consider to critique to be OK; they argue that it can minimize confusion by denoting the neutral, scholarly-type assessment that used to be what criticize meant. Here’s the thing, though: it’s still only some usage experts who accept to critique. Dictionaries’ usage panels are usually now split about 50–50 on sentences like “After a run-through, the playwright and director both critiqued the actor’s delivery.” And it’s not just authorities. A fair percentage of educated people still find to critique either wrong or irksome. Why alienate smart readers unnecessarily? If you’re worried that criticize will seem deprecatory, you can say evaluate, explicate, analyze, judge… or you can always use the old bury-the-main-verb trick and do offer a critique of, submit a critique of, etc.
Focus Focus is now the noun of choice for expressing what people used to mean by concentration (“Sampras’s on-court focus was phenomenal”) and priority (“Our focus is on serving the needs of our customers”). As an adj., it seems often to serve as an approving synonym for driven or monomaniacaclass="underline" “He’s the most focused warehouse manager we’ve ever had.” As a verb, it seems isomorphic with the older to concentrate: “Focus, people!”; “The Democrats hope that the campaign will focus on the economy”; “We need to focus on finding solutions instead of blaming each other,” etc. W/r/t those last two sample sentences, notice how the verb to focus on can take as its object either a thing-noun (“economy”) or a gerund (“finding”), and how its meaning and grammatical structure are slightly different in the two cases. With a noun, to focus on means “to concentrate attention or effort on,” i.e., the direct object is built right into the verb phrase; but with a gerund it means “to direct toward a particular goal”—there’s always a direct object like “attention/efforts/energies” that’s suppressed but understood, and the gerund actually functions as an indirect object. Given the speed with which to focus has supplanted to concentrate, it’s a little surprising that nobody objects to its somewhat jargony New Age feel — but nobody seems to. Maybe it’s because the word is only one of many film and drama terms that have entered mainstream usage in the last decade, e.g., to foreground (= to feature, to give top priority to); to background (= to downplay, to relegate to the back burner); scenario (= an outline of some hypothetical sequence of events), and so on.
Impossibly This is one of those adverbs that’s formed from an adjective and can modify only adjectives, never verbs. Modifying adjectives with these sorts of adverbs—impossibly fast, extraordinarily yummy, irreducibly complex, unbelievably obnoxious—is a hypereducated speech tic that translates well to writing. Not only can the adverbs be as colorful/funny/snarky as you like, but the device is a quick way to up the formality of your prose without sacrificing personality — it makes whoever’s narrating sound like an actual person, albeit a classy one. The big caveat is that you can’t use these special-adv.-with-adj. constructions more than once every few sentences or your prose starts to look like it’s trying too hard.
Individual As a noun, this word has one legitimate use, which is to distinguish a single person from some larger group: “One of the enduring oppositions of British literature is that between the individual and society”; “She’s a real individual.” It is not a synonym for person despite the fact that much legal, bureaucratic, and public-statement prose uses it that way — which is to say that it looms large in turgid crap like “Law-enforcement personnel apprehended the individual as he was attempting to exit the premises.” Individual for person and an individual for someone are pretentious, deadening puff-words. (For more on puff-words, please see the note at utilize.)
Fervent A beautiful and expressive word that combines the phonological charms of verve and fever. Lots of writers, though, think fervent is synonymous with fervid, and most dictionary defs. don’t do much to disabuse them. The truth is that there’s a hierarchical trio of zeal-type adjectives, all with roots in the Latin verb ferv
re (= to boil). Even though fervent can also mean extremely hot, glowing (as in “Fingering his ascot, Aubrey gazed abstractedly at the brazier’s fervent coals”), it’s actually just the baseline term; fervent is basically synonymous with ardent. Fervid is the next level up; it connotes even more passion/devotion/eagerness than fervent. At the top is perfervid, which means extravagantly, rabidly, uncontrollably zealous or impassioned. Perfervid deserves to be used more, not only for its internal alliteration and metrical pizzazz but because its deployment usually shows that the writer knows the differences between the three ferv