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Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

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Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#271

Post by dheera »

captainmuon wrote: post #268

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I actually prefer the use "is comprised of" over "comprises". For the supposedly correct version, you can almost always say it differently: E.g. simply: A proton contains three quarks. But if you want to use passive voice, there is no good other option. A proton is made of three quarks? Sounds too colloquial. ...is put together from...? No. I think "A proton is comprised of three quarks…

I believe technically speaking, "is composed of" is correct, "is comprised of" is not. Although "is comprised of" sounds more elite.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#272

Post by dotnet00 »

jl6 wrote: post #122

Wow, there’s a lot of unjustified negativity in this thread. The whole encyclopedia (and a whole bunch of the wider world of computing) is built out of this kind of hyper-focused nerding over details. These changes don’t make your day worse. He’s not shoving it in our faces or claiming it’s going to save the world. We don’t know what’s going on in this editor’s life or what he “should” be doing with his time instead.…

This isn't useful nerding over details. It's more like that annoying person who goes around GitHub making pull requests to big projects with just some pointless wording tweaks in the documentation so they can claim to have contributed to the project on their resume.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#273

Post by denton-scratch »

Isinlor wrote: post #101
p-e-w wrote: post #10

The justifications given in that essay leave a really bad taste in my mouth: > I believe using "comprised of" is poor writing, because > It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of". It adds nothing to the language. That's true for many, many other words. In fact, most instances of definite and indefinite articles "add nothing to the language", since the actual…

Slavic languages do perfectly fine without articles. As Polish speaker I say leave them out ;) .

> As Polish speaker I say leave them out

"As Polish speaker, I say leave out"?

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#274

Post by jfk13 »

naniwaduni wrote: post #247
denton-scratch wrote: post #214

"Comprises" means "consists of". So "comprised of" means "consists of of". It's not just that some people dislike it; it's simply wrong. Whenever I come across the word "utilize" in WP, I change it to "use" (with the edit comment "Don't utilize utilize"). Nobody's ever reverted me for that. I think there is a proper use for the verb "utilize": it means "to render useful". But usually, it's just a substitute for "use"…

The (expected) face-value meaning of "comprised of" is usually best substituted by "part of": All Gaul comprises three parts -> Three parts are comprised of all Gaul.

> All Gaul comprises three parts -> Three parts are comprised of all Gaul.

No, that doesn't work.

You could, however, say "Gaul is comprised of three parts".

https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/cw-comprise-comprised...

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#275

Post by devnullbrain »

ludston wrote: post #215

I enjoy collecting little things like this to annoy the grammar gatekeepers. Why say "regardless" when "irregardless" means the same thing but also annoys prescriptivists? "Ironical" instead of "ironic" and "less" instead of "fewer". Now that I know, "comprised of" fits in this category, it's definitely going to be a part of the everyday lexicon.

The use of prescriptivists as though it was a sports team is ironic. It's actually you who's pushing a certain use of language despite knowing that it's ambiguous. You're the one enforcing your language on others.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#276

Post by dotnet00 »

rvnx wrote: post #173
George83728 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand people who are sticklers for 'correctly' using some corporation's trademarks. "Can you xerox a copy of that for me?" "You know, our photocopy machine is made by HP and the Xerox corporation doesn't like when people genericize their..." Why the hell do they care on the corporations behalf? If you aren't being paid by that corp to care.. then why?

"Can you xerox for me, or can you IBM my software" ? Never heard of such, I understand why they get upset if someone sprinkle the sentences with ads.

"xerox" is a pretty common term for photocopy (particularly in Asia), just as "google" is a pretty common term for looking something up on the internet.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#277

Post by AlbertCory »

inimino wrote: post #120
AlbertCory wrote: post #12

I'm not saying she's wrong, but: In patent claims, "comprising" and "consisting of" are different: 6,151,604 claim 1 is: 1. A data storage and retrieval system for a computer memory, comprising: means for configuring said memory according to a logical table, said logical table including: ... 6,151,605 claim 1 is: 1. A method for allowing a software application to access a configuration file, said configuration file c…

Note that this is using the word "comprising" correctly, so is irrelevant to the topic of the incorrect usage.

TBH, I found her article intolerably tedious, so I didn't study it all.

I did notice she singled out "comprising of" for abuse, which it definitely deserves. In a claim you write "comprising" or "comprised of."

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#278

Post by lolinder »

denton-scratch wrote: post #214

"Comprises" means "consists of". So "comprised of" means "consists of of". It's not just that some people dislike it; it's simply wrong. Whenever I come across the word "utilize" in WP, I change it to "use" (with the edit comment "Don't utilize utilize"). Nobody's ever reverted me for that. I think there is a proper use for the verb "utilize": it means "to render useful". But usually, it's just a substitute for "use"…

> It's not just that some people dislike it; it's simply wrong.

Language changes. Words frequently develop the opposite meaning of what they originally had—opposites seem to be semantically closer and more prone to switching than completely unrelated words. When a word changes meaning, it is not wrong to use it in the new way, and at some point it even becomes wrong to use it in the original way: if you used "terrific" to mean "inspiring terror", you would confuse most of your audience!

In this particular case what I find funny is that the author acknowledges that this semantic shift has been going on for hundreds of years and all that was holding it back was the language purists. According to their own account, when the purists fell out of favor in the 60s it was like a dam burst.

The "incorrect" usage recently overtook the correct one in published books:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o...

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#279

Post by medler »

vivegi wrote: post #95

It is ironic that The New York Time Manual of Style and Usage [1] cited by the article as one of the authoritative sources often doesn't follow its own style guide. A Google search for "comprised of" in nytimes.com [2] gives around 4600+ results. A cursory glance at the first page of search results and the snippet text in the results all look fine. I guess, we could say, much ado about nothing. [1]: Siegal, Allan (19…

NYT notoriously makes a ton of errors in grammar and usage. The “NYTtypos” Twitter account is amusing reading if you’re into that sort of thing. https://twitter.com/nyttypos

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#280

Post by adjav »

za3faran wrote: post #145
cookiengineer wrote: post #131

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth because of our history in Germany. There was a bunch of institutes for the "Erhaltung der deutschen Sprache" which were all founded under the umbrella of a quasi-propaganda organization that officially was just a society/club. [1] They created their own "purified" dictionary with a "clean language" that was trying to find replacements for foreign words, and strengthen the nationali…

Just because there was an incident involving an extremist group, does not make the whole thing wrong or incorrect. As a counter example, High Arabic has been meticulously preserved, and Arab speakers take pride in that fact, regardless of the many spoken dialects that exist.

That's like saying Classical Latin has been meticulously preserved. Technically true, but entirely irrelevant.
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