In Maureen Dowd's Nov. 25 column about the increasingly thorough airport pat-downs of female travelers, she asks, "Do we have intelligence telling us that grandmothers are part of Al Qaeda now?" Her question begets other questions: Did we have intelligence telling us that teenage girls and boys would become suicide bombers for Hamas?
The more she told me, the more enthralled I became, and one question begat another.
Everything begets a question of political and ecological correctness.
So, when Haskins concludes "Yes, the nation needs its safety net, but improvements in personal responsibility would have a greater and more lasting impact on poverty and opportunity," his assertion begets a question for all of us.
In a rare, quiet moment, I would be sitting in her office and, closing my steno pad, I would say, "I want to ask you a question about 'unnatural world, whorled, begotten, petaled.' Why did you choose those adjectives: 'whorled, begotten, petaled'?" and Z. would lean forward, pause for a moment to absorb the question, and answer in a voice that told me how much my interest mattered to her.
Questions beget possibility.
Questions beget questions, as someone somewhere said.
As ever, it comes down to a question of ownership, and the unavoidable fact that wealth begets wealth.
All of Chiefdom was suddenly in a fit, searching for answers to a question that, just a week ago, was near no one's mind: "So, are we kind of bad?" The problem for sports fans is that winning begets expectations, which, for all but one team per year, begets disappointment.
A positive answer begets further questions.
A wrong question is not likely to beget a right answer.
