Grammar 101: Begging the Question

When words sound quite similar, it is very easy to get them confused. I see it all the time with word pairs like “compliment” and “complement.” A single letter can drastically change the meaning. The same thing happens with “solicit” and “elicit” (and to a lesser extent, “illicit”).

A great number of people, including professional journalists, seem to use “solicit” and “elicit” interchangeably. That’s not technically correct as they are two distinctly different words. According to The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style, “To solicit a response is to request it. To elicit a response is to get it.”

Politicians actively solicit votes from the public. Barack Obama actively campaigned his constituents, asking for voters to put a tick next to his name on the ballot. He requested the vote. On the flip side, Gordon Campbell’s introduction of the HST in British Columbia elicited a negative response from much of the general public. He didn’t ask for the negative response, but he certainly got it (and has since resigned as the Premier of BC).

Put another way, a customer survey is meant to elicit feedback from buyers. The store hopes to get feedback that it can then use to increase sales, improve customer service, or achieve whatever other objectives it may have. Even though it is actively seeking this feedback, it is generally more appropriate to say the store is eliciting feedback rather than soliciting it. This does start to fall into a gray area, though.

Going back to the Oxford Dictionary entry above, we find this useful tidbit:

The following example contains a slight ambiguity — is the core group to ask 4,000 people or to get 4,000 to co-operate? “Sentient representatives expect the core group to solicit [read elicit?] response from about 4,000 people.

Do you see the difference? If the core group was able to solicit 4,000 people, that means that it asked 4,000 people for their responses, not all of whom would actually offer a response. If the core group elicited 4,000 responses, it may have asked well more than 4,000 people in order to get that many replies.

If we assume a 50% response rate, for example, the first instance (“solicit”) would have 4,000 people asked and 2,000 responses, whereas the latter (“elicit”) would have 8,000 people asked and 4,000 responses.

And just as it is common to see people mistake discrete for discreet, they sometimes use “illicit” incorrectly too. This is an entirely different word than “solicit” and “elicit.” While the latter pair are always verbs, “illicit” is an adjective describing something as illegal, immoral, or illegitimate.

Clear as mud? Fantastic. 🙂