Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
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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”
#2I’m impressed.
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#3This definitely falls deep into the pedantry zone. Lots of modern English uſage was once wrong and has become normalized. The language doeſn't have an Académie calling the ſhots. It inevitably evolves, warts and all.
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#4https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c...
Every time we avoid saying "comprised of," the pedants win.
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#5This definitely falls deep into the pedantry zone. Lots of modern English uſage was once wrong and has become normalized. The language doeſn't have an Académie calling the ſhots. It inevitably evolves, warts and all.
Pedantic, perhaps, but within the purview of an editor of an encyclopedia enforcing a style guideline!
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#6I’m just glad this person is using a program he built to find articles using this specific phrase.
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#7Doing God’s work, fella. This is also a pet peeve of mine.
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#8This definitely falls deep into the pedantry zone. Lots of modern English uſage was once wrong and has become normalized. The language doeſn't have an Académie calling the ſhots. It inevitably evolves, warts and all.
I mean it's their time, if they want to do something useless but harmless, why not? Unless this is their first step in a grand scheme to halt the evolution of language, I don't see a problem here.
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#9This definitely falls deep into the pedantry zone. Lots of modern English uſage was once wrong and has become normalized. The language doeſn't have an Académie calling the ſhots. It inevitably evolves, warts and all.
And even if there was an Académie, what authority would they have?
Eg the French have one, but that doesn't mean they have any moral authority.
Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
#10The 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 information is in the noun. Just leave them out, right? "I go house."
> It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.
"To comprise" and "to be comprised of" contain the same word, but not in the same sense.
> The etymology of the word does not support "comprised of".
That's irrelevant to the current meaning of the word. This is called an "etymological fallacy"[1].
> It's new. Many current Wikipedia readers were taught to write at a time when not one respectable dictionary endorsed "comprised of" in any way. It was barely ever used before 1970.
Good luck reading Wikipedia, or any newspaper article, if you are uncomfortable with language coined during the past half-century. What exactly is that "Internet" thing people keep talking about? Note that "The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionaries regard the form comprised of as standard English usage."[2]
The author could have just written "I don't like 'comprised of', and I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time."