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 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."
> > It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of". It adds nothing to the language.
I wonder if the editor read "1984" and straight up copied its ideas. In the novel, the totalitarian state of Oceania uses that exact same justification to promote the use of the Newspeak language:
> After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? ... Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.
Perhaps that is lightandnotlight. We almost have notlight in English: unlit. An unlit room feels twilighty to me.
> notright
Left in Esperanto: maldekstra
I can’t imagine why a language designer would choose “mal” as the prefix for “not”. In English and Spanish (two common languages), mal has some bad connotations (malodour, malady, malfeasance, malo, malformed). Let’s try the opposite: “not left” is definitely something different from “right” - urrrgggh. “Do not go left” doesn’t mean to go right.
However it looks like Esperanto also has “liva”. Turnu liven tuj post la angulo ~= Turn left immediately after the corner.
> Let’s try the opposite: “not left” is definitely something different from “right” - urrrgggh. “Do not go left” doesn’t mean to go right.
“maldekstra” doesn't actually mean “not right” — mal in Esperanto more precisely means “opposite.” Left is opposite of right, and so malmaldekstra (opposite of the opposite of right) is still right (dekstra).
“Not right” in Esperanto doesn't exactly mean left, either, just like in in English. That'd be ne + dekstra = nedesktra.
Sure. It just feels like a malicious choice for left. No soy maleducado. !Tengo mucho mano izquirdo, y es derecho mio a decir la palabra “maldekstra” es «malappropriate»¡
Joan Bastardas habla de la extrañeza de la existencia de la palabra ensinistrar del catalán, puesto que tiene un significado claramente positivo a pesar de ser derivado de siniestro-a. «... ensinistrar que no deixa de sorprendre els qui s´acosten al català des d´altres llengües romàniques, en què les idees d´habilitat i aptesa s´associen amb la mà dreta i no amb la mà esquerra, el castellà adiestrar, l´italià addestrare; en francès hi ha dexterité, però també en català hi ha destresa i destre-a 'hàbil', 'expert', i també maldestre, com el francès maladroit». (Bastardas 1996: 26)
la contraposición entre la bondad y la justicia — simbolizados por la derecha — y la maldad, el egoísmo —relacionados con la izquierda—.
> I can’t imagine why a language designer would choose “mal” as the prefix for “not”. In English and Spanish (two common languages), mal has some bad connotations (malodour, malady, malfeasance, malo, malformed).
Well, there's also the Latin word "sinister" which has a very different meaning in English... Kinda seems like a common theme.
> However it looks like Esperanto also has “liva”. Turnu liven tuj post la angulo ~= Turn left immediately after the corner.
If you wanted to be understood, it'd be better to say maldekstren though. I'd never heard of liv-, English Wiktionary lists it as "neologism, nonstandard" and Reta Vortaro as "malofte" (infrequent).
Orwell certainly did not take an "anything goes" approach to language, which is essentially what you and others argue for, in the mistaken belief that you're somehow striking a blow at totalitarianism. From my perspective, your position is much closer to the Newspeak ethos than that of someone who actually cares about correct usage.
> your position is much closer to the Newspeak ethos
I sure haven't stated "my position" in any of my previous comments. But assuming it refers to common english, I'm reminded of another "1984" concept: doublethink.
First, my original comment wasn't about defending anything. My objection was limited to a specific justification the Wikipedia editor made.
Second, the phrase is "comprised of," not "to comprise."
Finally, I'd also like to point out that the editor and all people in this thread clearly knows how the phrase is used today. What's the point of arguing about the correctness of a phrase when it does a perfect job of conveying meaning?
> What's the point of arguing about the correctness of a phrase when it does a perfect job of conveying meaning?
See this is what I mean when I say that your position is closer to the Newspeak ethos. What's wrong with ungood, after all? It does a perfect job of conveying meaning.
See this is what I mean when I say your arguments resemble doublethink.
The Newspeak language eradicates words on the basis that they're redundant. The Wikipedia editor went to eradicate a phrase using the same justification. There's an obvious parallel here.
> It does a perfect job of conveying meaning.
This is a fact that holds true regardless of one's opinion. Yet, you're fallaciously framing this as an opinion to make it look like Oceania and I hold the same opinion.
When it comes to my actual opinion, I favor languages spoken as is. Newspeak, on the others hand, is an artificially restricted one. The false equivalence you made between these two conflicting positions can only be explained as doublethink.
Well this guy on Wikipedia, who clearly cares more then you do, for one. Dictionaries, style guides, people like Orwell, the French do have a ministry to maintain the language.
I've answered your question, now I have one for you: Did you even glance at the link?
I'm sorry, these epistemologically relativist arguments lead to utterly absurd conclusions. How does wikipedia work at all? How can we ever make judgements about anything?
It's bad Cartesianism. Just because we can't know something absolutely doesn't mean we can't know anything. Just because language changes doesn't mean there's no such thing as correct and incorrect usage.
Dictionaries generally explicitly do not define what is correct, they describe what is in use (often with notes about the contexts of common use).
> style guides
Style guides do not define what is correct for the language, they define what is correct for those adopting the style, they are intentionally by design more limited than what is acceptable in the language to serve, for adopting institutions, the function of providing a common style (that’s why they are called style guides, rather than language guides.)
Noah Webster, of the US Webster's Dictionary was a language reformer and created a prescriptive dictionary intended to "correctly instruct" people about what he believed the correct use and spelling of English to be.
He introduced American spelling and American English.
By constrast the Oxford English Dictionary was created by lexicographers intent on mapping the usage of English across space and time, they created multiple entries for each form | usage of root words and added copious notes (in the full multi volume OED editions) regarding first usage, alternate spellings, regional changes, etc.
> Noah Webster [...] created a prescriptive dictionary intended to "correctly instruct" [...]
Webster lived 200 years ago, and today prescriptivism is rejected by the overwhelming majority of linguists, because it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what language is. Prescriptivism is about as well supported as phrenology, and shares many of its discriminatory goals. It was something people made up, that turned out to not make any actual sense, and that was subsequently abandoned by almost everyone.
Webster can instruct people on how to correctly write "Webster Language". But he cannot instruct people on how to correctly write English. English is whatever its users say and write. No other sensible definition exists.
> Noah Webster, of the US Webster’s Dictionary was a language reformer and created a prescriptive dictionary intended to “correctly instruct” people about what he believed the correct use and spelling of English to be
Yes, he was.
And while some of his reforms caught on and remain in use to this day, his approach to dictionaries generally did not. When I said dictionaries do not do that, the verb tense was significant.
I don't think anyone is saying that "anything goes" and there's no right or wrong ways of writing, they're just arguing that your narrow definition of "correct" is too narrow to be useful for anything other than gatekeeping.
How does wikipedia work? How does language work? Linguists have firmly determined that it does not work by a coterie of elites handing down decisions about correctness, regardless of what france pretends their "immortels" do.
That also doesn't mean "anything goes" either, obviously, since we do clearly speak a mutually comprehensible dialect through no intentional coordination. It's an interesting subject! You could stand to have some curiosity about its actual mechanics, there's a lot to be learned that is invisible to you if you've already decided how it should work.
You need to chill. I'm doing my best to engage with your viewpoint within my completely human tolerance of discredited scientific ideas. Like the other commenter said you're doing the language equivalent of endorsing phrenology here and all I can have is imperfect patience for it.
But I'm not trolling you or intentionally fucking with you or anything. You are fundamentally wrong about how language works and maybe what language even is, and you're extremely hostile to genuine attempts to engage with that so I'm gonna take off. Good luck with it.
I get heated about this lol. If you really meant well, I'm not sure what to say. Try reading a comment before responding to it. My original comment was about the validity of an Orwell analogy, a point which you have absolutely refused to engage.
Calling you a troll was my most charitable reading of your obtuseness, because if you weren't willfully so, you must be either unconsciously so, or, well, just bad at reading.
If I'm a phrenologist, so is Orwell, and newspeak is not a valid analogy.
Orwell wasn't a linguist, so his ideas about language are suspect. Linguists study languages as natural things because that's how it works: Humans speak, humans change how they speak, and language evolves, whereas "Newspeak" was deliberately constructed such that "correctness" was controlled by a tight coterie of people in charge, utterly without regard for making language useful, which you'd know if you read the novel it comes from.
Why people think they're entitled to their own ignorance is quite beyond me.
First of all, I have read 1984, and I wouldn't take issue with the analogy if I hadn't. Whether you have read any other books, I cannot say.
Second, you say Orwell isn't a linguist, and language just happens, but then you explicitly reference his fictional account of a prescribed language. Clearly, Esperanto is a prescribed language. So prescribed languages do exist, and political forces can shape languages, you just don't think that happens with English. Well I do. People reference so-called "descriptive" dictionaries and grammars, yet don't those texts themselves inherently acquire a prescriptive force, insofar as they originate at elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge and UChicago? Just as Dante's works acquired a prescriptive force for the Italian that was once highly regional, but needed standardization to support the nation-state.
I think descriptivism is an incredibly naive position to take when talking about modern languages that have agglomerated for explicit social, political, and economic projects, and I think that was Orwell's point.
Similar to David Foster Wallace's essay on English, we can either naively push the descriptivist line, or we can accept that "the powers that be" do indeed shape our language, and try to have our own voices heard, for what English ought to be.
So we can rail against the Newspeak that some editor on Wikipedia is supposedly forcing on us. We can say it's literally 1984. It's ungood! And we can happily return to talking about grokking and gatekeeping and unaliving, and undocumented immigrants, and unhoused people, and utilizing the new library, believing these words are good because they happened and that they happened because they're good.
> Clearly, Esperanto is a prescribed language. So prescribed languages do exist and political forces can shape languages, you just don't think that happens with English.
You're misreading me: I'm saying that English didn't come into existence by fiat, and that it doesn't evolve through fiat most of the time. English, being a natural language as opposed to a constructed one, evolves naturally.
> Well I do. People reference so-called "descriptive" dictionaries and grammars, yet don't those texts themselves inherently acquire a prescriptive force, insofar as they originate at elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge and UChicago?
That doesn't change the fact they're descriptive. It also doesn't change the fact linguistics is descriptive.
> I think descriptivism is an incredibly naive position to take when talking about modern languages that have agglomerated for explicit social, political, and economic projects, and I think that was Orwell's point.
Well, you can get a degree in linguistics and learn what "descriptivism" actually means, then, because you certainly don't know it now.
Okay, originally I just had to read 1984, to comment on an hn thread, now I need a 4 year linguistics degree. Increasing appeals to authority, when the previous one fails you.
You seem to be arguing that descriptivism is just what linguistics "does", therefore it does not inherently contradict prescriptivism? Because they have two separate roles. And if descriptivists stayed in their lane, and allowed prescription where obviously necessary (like when teaching a language) then we wouldn't be having this argument in the first place.
But if descriptivists turn around and say "therefore thou shalt not prescribe"، then we do have a problem, and descriptivists are indeed naive, they are the real prescribers of an ill-conceived political program.
It seems like the editor is just fishing for a reason to make lots of edits and backed into logic so their stuff doesn’t get reverted.
I love wikis and knowledge bases but this is exactly the kind of stuff that detracts.
On one case, who cares what this person does with their time.
On the other case, it wastes the attention of 90k authors who need to figure out whether they care and have their writing style overridden by a rando.
I think the correct way to do this is to appeal to a writing style that gets argued over (sometimes perpetually) and when settled then the 90k edits can be made. This edit would be an argument presented to change the style guide.
Since “comprised of” is proper usage I doubt it would be proscribed in the style guide.
In my org I used to waste minutes of having writings where people expressed preferences for “and” vs “&” or Oxford comma or whether data are plural and edited things back and forth. Then I just found a style guide and adopted it and ask that people not revert changes based on preferences that break the style guide.
> On the other case, it wastes the attention of 90k authors who need to figure out whether they care and have their writing style overridden by a rando.
On the other hand, if you're editing wikipedia and you expect your writing to not be subject to rando edits, you won't last long.
People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland.
But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediately true for everyone.
Additionally, it's not about a person making text easier to read or not from one (or multiple peoples') perspectives -- this appears to be about someone going on a stylistic crusade en masse. Objecting to the edits being an act of 'imposing their preference on the world' feels similar to the political mirror-projection kind of argument that can happen.
I think there is interesting discussion to be had (is it better? are there good ways to use it? when/where/how? what is the ethicality of editing articles like this? is a disclaimer wiki entry enough? etc etc), and maybe we can focus on that.
I can't see how eliminating a common misuse of an otherwise dead word wouldn't be clearer to nonnative speakers and less painful to the brains of native speakers. There are a lot of people who want to add dead vocabulary back to sound important and they'll succeed often enough with words that are at best unnecessary synonyms that convey no additional information. We don't really have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they do it completely wrong.
This conversation has gone back in a circle though. The original parent comment here pointed out that none of the arguments given for why it's a "misuse" hold water. "I can't see how eliminating a common misuse wouldn't be clearer" is not a responsive reply to "it's not a misuse."
I thought the article was clear enough. Comprises with no preposition matches its first and uncontested use. The preposition form is using the second more debatable form to create the first in a way that implies ignorance or wordiness any editor should correct.
> People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of".
I think that phrase is always incorrect. I suspect the problem is that people aren't used to words that take a list as their direct argument, like "comprise".
Wikipedia leans heavily to descriptivism (as do nearly all lexicons, these days). So there's no incorrect usage; there's only usage that jars, for some people.
I don't go around telling people they're ignorant because they can't speak their mother-tongue properly. That would simply be rude. But English text intended for publication should be correct English; it shouldn't be garbled, whether because it's written by a non-native speaker, or a native speaker who isn't well-read.
That implies that there is such a thing as "correct English". This seems obvious to me, but that's exactly what descriptivists deny.
Let's not get into whether "literally" is a synonym for "figuratively".
Correct according to whom? The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings. Precriptivism of a living natural language is hubris.
What seems like perfect English to you is not perfect to everyone.
> The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings.
Disagree. The language I speak didn't exist 800 years ago. The Anglo-saxons wouldn't have understood me, and I wouldn't have understood them.
And there were barely a billion human beings just 800 years ago - forget about thousands of years.
I didn't mention "prescriptivism", although it's obviously the opposite of descriptivism.
I thiink you mistake "prescriptivism" for a sort of law-making,like grammar-nazis. I mean something more like a general acceptance that words do have particular meanings, and that it's possible to be wrong about the meaning or use of a word.
Whether or not that is the case, once enough wrong'uns do their thing it becomes correct, correct? Whatever the history or logic or what have you.
So it becomes more a question of whether "90k instances on Wikipedia, has made it into dictionaries" is either far too late, or merely a lost cause.
With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language". I speak fluent Spanish but I wouldn't presume to correct a native Spanish speaker on their style.
I also wouldn't base your opinions of what makes for good English on the ramblings of one Wikipedian whose primary argument seems to be that they had to work hard to learn to use the word a particular way and so everyone else should for the rest of time.
With all due respect, I am a native English speaker and I agree with the GP. I wouldn't go as far as the Wikipedian in question (I surely have far better uses of my time than to make many tens of thousands of edits over a trivial nitpick), but the end result does read better and I'd have a hard time justifying a reversion of such an edit.
Also, considering that plenty of non-native English speakers read the English Wikipedia, there is plenty of value in the English writing in the English Wikipedia being maximally clear without sacrificing the intended meaning of the text. Dismissing feedback out of hand on the basis of "well the person giving the feedback ain't a native English speaker" misses the point of Wikipedia being a resource for everyone.
Broadening this beyond Wikipedia, the English language itself "is comprised of" countless words and grammatical structures yanked straight out of other languages, often by non-native speakers importing features of their native languages for all sorts of reasons. Knowing this history, I hereby authorize non-native speakers to critique the language and elements thereof; it's just as much their language as it is mine, and they therefore have just as much a right to it as I do.
> With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language"
They said "find the edited sentences always easier to read" and that's valuable regardless if you're a native speaker or not. Of course, what "better language" is as subjective as "clean code" so probably won't reach any consensus there.
But all of this is highly subjective in the end, so everyone's opinion is equally worth, native speaker or not.
> I find it just wild that people would object to better language.
They're either saying that their own sense of what is more legible is enough to define what is better, or they're buying into the pedantic arguments in TFA.
As to what is easier to read, I think the English Wikipedia should be written to be legible to native English speakers. This is better for everyone: native English speakers can read their Wikipedia, and English learners get exposed to actual English usage rather than a simplified version.
In this case, it's not obvious to me that any substantial portion of the English-speaking population sincerely gets confused by "comprised of". It feels much more like the insistence on not ending sentences in prepositions: a rule for the sake of having a rule.
EDIT: In fact, "comprised of" recently overtook "comprises" in published books:
> This is better for everyone: native English speakers can read their Wikipedia, and English learners get exposed to actual English usage rather than a simplified version
Side note, there is an actual "simplified english" wikipedia. So even early learners who want a simplified resource have one aside from regular Wikipedia. https://simple.wikipedia.org/
> But all of this is highly subjective in the end, so everyone's opinion is equally worth, native speaker or not.
That subjectivity doesn’t equate to the equal worth of all opinions. It just means that no one opinion can be considered universal.
That lack of universality doesn’t mean that picking any one direction is as good as picking any other.
If I strongly prefer a Victorian style, giving my preference equal weight is likely to make the content far less valuable, because my preference is not a common one.
It would be necessary to examine the goals behind the content: the audience it is intended for, the desired effect on that audience, the nuances lost by preferring audience B over Audience A, the impact of that loss, etc.
Everyone should be allowed to have a preference, absolutely, but applying individual preferences to content does not lead to equivalent outcomes.
It’s not obvious to me that only native speakers should have the right to pronounce on linguistic changes or the aptness of linguistic use. Some possible arguments, and responses:
1. Non-native speakers lack the competence necessary to make such pronouncements.
It’s false to deny that many non-native speakers acquire near-native competence. So if we think that ordinary native speakers have the right to pronounce on these questions, at least some particularly skilled non-native speakers should too. Perhaps the claim then is that there’s a high standard that only a few native speakers and no non-native speakers reach. It’s unclear what would motivate that view; given that language is something we all use, it is doubtful that e.g. the perspicacity of a particular construction should only be commented upon by the most skilled speakers.
2. Native speakers’ claims to influence languages should have priority over those of non-native speakers.
We might simply view this as obvious, in which case there’s something of a conflict of interest. I think the more plausible argument is grounded in the use of language. Someone who never uses French will not really have particularly important opinions on its use. The problem here is that it’s unclear why native speakers’ intuitions are really more important. The English language is surely just as important to a Nigerian civil servant who operates nearly entirely in English as it is to one in Whitehall. The difference between non-native speakers and native speakers don’t seem relevant unless we take being a native speaker per se to be of import.
Simplifying the language, so that non-native speakers can understand it, doesn't automatically make the text better. That's a wild assertion. Worse yet, Simple English Wikipedia exists for that exact purpose.
Well, yes, but other words aren’t wrong and irritating to many readers. The point is that the usage in question has several disadvantages, but zero redeeming features.
> "To comprise" and "to be comprised of" contain the same word, but not in the same sense.
That’s not the point. “To shoot” and “to be shot” contain the same word, but mean opposite things, but that’s a well understood result of active vs passive voice, and nobody objects to that.
However, imagine some people would start using “to be shot” to mean “to shoot”. So, they’d say “Peter was shot by Paul” to mean that Peter shot Paul, that is, Paul was shot by Peter. And then the dictionary would add that as a secondary meaning. Can’t you see how people might object to that?
I don't see it. The 50 states comprise the United States. The United States is comprised of the 50 states. You can change the word, and the exact same "issues" persist. The 50 states make up the whole of the United States. The whole of the United Sates is made up of the 50 states.
This is the crux of the issue to me - this use of "comprised of" is a completely logical and consistent usage whether or not some people think it's wrong. Plenty of times correct constructions are considered wrong by lots of people, this is what leads to the phenomenon of "hypercorrections". I won't argue that this is necessarily one since the "corrections" don't strike me as better or worse, but languages are inherently subjective. For this reason I find it distasteful to go around enforcing linguistic policies on others.
Except that, per the article, the "correct" rendering would be "The United States comprises the 50 states" or "The 50 states are comprised by the United States" - because the United States is composed of / contains / includes the 50 states. Therein lies the issue: the word "comprised" is being used opposite from its actual meaning.
There probably ain't much we can realistically do about that, though. Words get misused until they're redefined all the time ("literally" being the popular contemporary example). Such are the joys of English being descriptivist.
Well sure it’d be unsettling but like… what, are you just going to stop language from changing? Good luck with that. We’re just along for the ride, if people start using it that way, then that’s what it means now. Objecting to that is about as much use as to be pissed into the wind.
If language legitimately changes so a sentence or phrase has two opposite yet universally used meanings, (presumably resolved in each instance by context), it would still be better writing to avoid it when clarity of meaning is paramount.
Encyclopedias are a good place to make as few assumptions and gambles as possible with regard to how a reader might comprehend what is written.
So are things that mean opposite things depending on locale, like "tabling" an issue. It may be ok within a local group, but would be avoided in writing inside a multinational corporation.
There are other common examples of active and passive meaning the same thing. "The document is printing" and "the document is being printed", for example. It has no merit other than a popular consensus that it's correct, which is all that's required.
There is no legal right "not to be irritated". It is incorrect to state that this particular case has "no redeeming features". The fact that the phrase is in common usage is all the justification it needs. What's next, "Won't is not a logical contraction of 'will not'"?
"Comprises" is frequently used in patent writing, but I have rarely seen it elsewhere. I think its use, both in patents and normal English, has a particular connotation, that "is comprised of" doesn't carry otherwise:
* When I hear "X comprises Y and Z," I think that the author is saying that X includes Y and Z as its key parts, but is not precluding the existence of other parts
* When I hear "X is comprised of Y and Z," I think Y and Z are the only parts of X
This might have originally been a misuse of the word "comprise" to mean "compose," but I feel like that's a pretty big distinction in meaning.
Interesting. I think when an author says "X comprises Y and Z”, they assert precisely that Y and Z constitute X, that is, are the only parts of X. Otherwise the author should have written “X contains” or “X includes Y and Z”.
Articles obviously add information: is it a specific, known house you are going to (I'm going to the house) or a non-specific/not previously referred to (I'm going to a house)?
When it's your own house you're going to, you could argue the definite article wouldn't add anything, and the phrasal verb to go home drops it (ie. I'm going home), though adding an article is possible and changes the meaning (I'm going to the/a home, in the context of a home for the elderly or some such).
This statement is true only if it is not possible to tell from the context if the noun refers to a specific/previously mentioned thing or not.
It would be possible to measure the amount of information contained in these articles, Shannon style, by taking a body of text, removing the articles, and then asking a bunch of english speakers ( that can possibly be approximated by a LLM ) to put back in the correct articles. Any uncertainty or variation would point to information being lost by the removal.
I was thinking about Shannon entropy as well, as the OP completely forgets the word 'from' as well! "I go to house", "I go from house". Certainly, house contains more information, but the concepts of to and from as some kind of token do contain meaningful amounts of entropy as well.
I would leave the argument but tweak the example given to support: it "adds nothing to the language" that we have many more or less perfectly synonymous terms, such as purse/handbag, pop/soda, and so on.
They're regional though. "Purse" and "handbag" don't have the same meaning in the UK, and "pop" and "soda" are rare in their US meaning.
In this case "compose" and "comprise" do have different meanings. "Compose" has the sense of "put together" whereas "comprise" is closer to "contain". You'd never say "contained of" unless you were going for a really archaic sentence construction. I think it's less clear that "comprised of" is incorrect in all cases, but I do agree it sounds ugly and that there's almost always going to be a better phrasing available.
Wikipedia themselves maintain a page about "comprised of" that has citations going back to the 18th Century. I think it has been long enough to concede that it has the supposedly objectionable meaning.
"I'm going house" contains less meaning than "I'm going to [a] house". Without the preposition, it could mean "I'm leaving [a] house" ("I'm going from house").
I read this and googled a bit and don't quite understand what the problem is with "comprised of".
The author says this "The 9th district is comprised of all of Centerville" should be replaced by "The 9th district comprises all of Centerville"? That's it?
Oh that misses my favorite, "egregiously" which means both done very well and done exceptionally wrong, the latter used more commonly, the former archaic.
But in my language we only use the original positive meaning, so I was deeply confused by English using it for a long time.
While we're on trivia, the etymology of this word is the Latin for "leaving the flock." The Japanese word 抜群, meaning "exceptional," has this exact same etymology except by way of Chinese rather than Latin.
Ah yes, this is indeed the subject of a Terry Pratchett bit about elves in "Lords and Ladies"
> Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.
One of my favorites is “nonplussed,” because its evolution into two opposite things is both generational and split across British vs North American English.
I don’t love “is comprised of,” and think it can usually be replaced with something like “contains” or simply “is,” resulting in a better, more direct sentence. But I’m not going to go on a crusade against it.
Correction: "I'm planning on staying at four hotels, but there might be more depending on how my trip goes (because it's not completely 100% planned out)."
"Consists of" creates a minimum bound, not an exact amount.
For that matter, meaning was already lost in the original post: If "comprised of" was used in the original sentence, it would mean at least one of the hotels was a destination itself rather than just a place to stay (a historic building or something, for example).
It really depends on sentence flow. With the usual SVO order, the subject becomes the focus.
If the context or dialogue goes like this: "Where are you staying for your vacation?" then the logical subject of the answer should come first, e.g. "I am staying ..."
However if the lead-in focuses more on the itinerary rather than the traveler, e.g.
"What is your plan? Can you describe your itinerary?" then it makes a lot of sense to start with "My itinerary involves..." or "My itinerary consists of..." or for a passive voice, "My itinerary is composed of..."
"I plan on staying at four hotels.", if you want to more accurately preserve the original meaning (just because it's on the itinerary doesn't mean I'll actually be staying at all four hotels, but it does typically mean there's a plan I intend to follow).
To make your “comprised” example correct, I guess it would have to be something like “the alphabet is comprised of five vowels, twenty consonants, and Y, which can be either.”
(Note: Wikipedia lists W as also sometimes a vowel now?)
This is an OK sentence, probably because the alphabet is not very complicated. But we’re basically stuck describing the whole thing in one sentence because of the use of “comprised.”
If we’d gone with “contains,” we’d have more flexibility, we could break it down and do one component per sentence, for example.
It isn’t always wrong, it just makes a lot of decisions for you and they aren’t always optimal.
Exactly. You know what else is completely unnecessary? The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. The reflecting pool at the Mall in Washington, DC. Ten million other thngs. That something is 'completely unnecessary' is a completely insufficient reason to annihilate it, especially it it has wormed its way into common experience.
>Note that "The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionaries regard the form comprised of as standard English usage."
I've never found this a convincing argument. Think of when you use a dictionary: it's because you want to understand a word that you don't understand in its context. If it didn't include all uses, the dictionary wouldn't help you. A dictionary a tool to help consume language.
If you want help to produce language, you refer to a style guide. The barrier for acceptability is much higher there.
By fixing a common mistake on a collaboratively edited encyclopedia? What are you even talking about? Do you have any idea what an editor does at the New York Times?
But it’s not a mistake to everyone, it’s just a mistake in this person and some others eyes.
But it’s an accepted usage of the words.
I’m not exactly familiar with specific editorial duties, but it seems NYTimes editors allow “comprised of” [0] so they don’t seem to correct all occurrences of “comprised of” by changing text to “composed of.”
Yes it's a mistake exactly in the eyes of those who know the meaning of the word. "com" + "prise" = "grasp together". An error can be more common than the correct usage and still be an error.
Would you accept "A table setting is included of plate, fork, knife and spoon." as correct usage? What if "included" becomes rarely used in the future and this incorrect usage becomes relatively popular? Would that make it correct? Nonsense.
The job of an editor is to raise the level of the writing before it goes to print, including fixing common mistakes. A professional writer would just learn something from it and improve. What I'm amazed by is the number of people who seem outraged, like someone's right to freedom of expression is being violated because someone came along after and removed some mistakes and improved the writing, literally a Wikipedia editor just doing the job of an editor. And then a whole essay has to be written justifying it, and that's still not enough, and we are all discussing it even further. It's a remarkable phenomenon.
It makes me wonder if software developers are as defensive about common programming mistakes. If so we might have a bit of a problem.
This is a terrible argument first because etymology is not meaning, but more importantly because "grasp together" doesn't seem to rule out the errant meaning. "This table setting grasps together a plate, a cup, and several pieces of silverware." seems if anything less wrong than "A plate, a cup, and several pieces of flatware grasp together this table setting."
Your argument is that etymology doesn't matter, but you also make the etymological argument the other way?
Well, ok, but we are not criticizing use of "comprise" but of "comprised of".
This table setting grasps together [three things].
This table setting comprises three things.
This table setting [together grasps] three things.
These are all correct.
*This table setting is grasped of a plate, cup, and flatware.
*This table setting is comprised of a plate, cup and flatware.
*This is grasped-together of a plate, cup, and flatware.
These are all wrong, for the same reason (so it can't be the Oxford comma).
If you wouldn't say it out loud with "comprised of" replaced by "included of", then it's wrong. That's the simple rule.
The backwards version is "The plate, cup, and flatware is comprised of the place setting" means "The plate, cup, and flatware is the total-grasping-together of the place setting."
It becomes clear if you write it this way how awkward it is, and the preposition clearly seems like the wrong one, so this is why the standard advice is just to avoid this confused, clunky phrasing.
My point was that your argument was bad, not that we should misuse "comprise." So yes, I noted that etymology doesn't matter when determining modern meaning, but went on to point out that even if we assume that it does the argument doesn't hold up, because it's a terrible argument.
You talk a lot here, but none of it actually follows. People write "is comprised of" because they confused it with "is composed of". "Com-pose" means "place together"; doing the same things does not make clear which should be which way 'round.
For the record, I kinda like having a separate word for "makes up" versus "is made up of" and would prefer people stop confusing the two. I just don't think we need garbage arguments in support.
Why not? Plenty of English words evolved this way. What's the problem exactly?
In linguistic terms, "comprised of" in English is commonly accepted and understood, and usage almost always overrides "logic" or other rules and regularities in the language.
Every time it happens it gets harder for the next generation to read Shakespeare. Just because something has changed a lot is not an argument for changing it more.
"I go house" is not standard English. When they said 'There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of"' it is implied that those other ways are standard English.
>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."
But they are not imposing their preference. They are making an improvement that has a consensus and the edit is appreciated by the authors of the text and Wikipedia editors.
Look at the "Reaction to the project" and the barn star awards they got. People whose text was edited to remove "comprised of" thanked this person for their work. Only 1% of the time the edit was reverted. Their work is overwhelmingly viewed as a good thing for Wikipedia.
It is a consensus reached by the Wikipedia editing community, or the edits wouldn't be so overwhelmingly accepted. There are probably more than 90k typos in Wikipedia that doesn't mean they are correct.
"Standard English" is a poor choice of words, but I'm not sure how to describe what "I go house" is. Not grammatically correct English?
I suspect that this is an obsessive-compulsive thing. So as long as they're not making the articles worse then I say just let them do it if they need to.
Forgive me if I decline to take writing advice from someone who tells me "I go house" is meaningful English. It isn't. It's violates the rules of grammar, rules which are a description of the normal English as used by members of the English speaking community. English expects you to specify whether you go into, towards, around, out of, or through the window of a house, or the house that we already know we are talking about, or Joe's house.
the justifications in the essay might be poor, but it is sensible to restrict the language of wikipedia to be as unambiguous as possible, given its status as "authoritative on most topics".
For an example in the other direction, wikipedia should ban the word inflammable. Its original meaning, which some authors will definitely prefer (if they are pedants), is entirely the opposite meaning of the colloquial meaning. Should wikipedia pick a meaning for the word, which people are free to ignore, or just outright ban it? (except in etymology wikipedia, where it is an example of a word, rather than part of the explanatory grammar)
The most relevant argument is: this is an encyclopedia, its very purpose is to be precise. And words like "comprise" are specifically about defining the meaning and composition of terms. If the encyclopedia is sloppy with words why does it even exist?
Another point: the era of a human doing rote language cleanup is nearly over; surely an LLM can do better?
you're right that the essay is poorly argued. it all amounts to a whole lot of words saying basically "i don't like it" and trying to claim opinions as fact.
but also, i agree. i don't like it either. so i'm not sure the whole essay is necessary, but i appreciate the work this person is doing to remove the bad writing from wikipedia.
"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" that sounds more erudite, or something. I think to utilize something is to take something that is useless, and turn it into something useful. That's not the same as using the thing.
I know this is shocking to people but if a phrase is systematically used by native speakers, it is then part of the language. There is no notion of native speakers being systematically wrong in linguistics. It wouldn't make sense scientifically.
In order to examine natural languages using the scientific method, linguists gather data (i.e. native speakers' spoken or written communication) and then analyze this (i.e. find predictive models of this data). Gathering data, then claiming the data is wrong is epistemologically unfounded. Languages simply are the way they are. This would be like gathering data from Hubble and then deciding photons are wrong because their behavior mismatch with Newtonian laws.
OK, but does that mean the phrase should be used as such in an encyclopedia?
For instance, the word "biweekly" now means both "once every two weeks" and "twice per week". I don't mind usage of that word for those two meanings. Obviously, linguists can gather data and analyze how it's being used. They may conclude that one meaning was more favored 50 years ago and the other meaning is now.
But when I'm reading an encyclopedia, I'd prefer it to avoid this ambiguous word.
Your example doesn't map, though. There is no ambiguity when I say "curry is comprised of beans and carrots". It's just a way of using the word that some native speakers have used their whole lives and other native speakers find jarring.
As a non-native English speaker, the issue that I've had with the dual meaning of "comprise" is that I was first introduced to it via the "is comprised of" usage which resulted in me equating "comprised" with "composed" or "made up" As in: "X is comprised of Y and Z" == "X is composed of Y and Z" == "X is made up of Y and Z"
Some time later, I came across the usage "X comprises Y and Z" and, based on my previous understanding that "comprise" == "compose," I took that to mean "X composes Y and Z" which, in other words, means "Y and Z are made up of X". But really, it means the other way around which is that "X is made up of Y and Z!" Only when I learned about the dual meaning of "comprise" did I correctly understand it to mean the latter.
To this day, I still have to actively juggle this arbitrary "dual-rule" in my head when I come across "comprise."
Does “utilize” really lead to such ambiguities? Or “comprised of”? I’d be really surprised… maybe in rare cases? I haven’t read the entire linked manifesto so maybe he has some examples!
Biweekly (and probably semi-weekly) is one of those words that should be generally avoided. It's like depending on some less obvious operator precedence rule rather than parentheses. You may be technically correct, but you shouldn't do it that way because others will misunderstand you.
ADDED: I'm genuinely confused why people would disagree with this (which is in multiple style guides). I assume it's some variant of I know what it really means and, if someone else doesn't, that's their problem. But that seems antithetical to writing to communicate something to an audience.
Yes, comprised/utilize doesn't really matter because you will know from context, but biweekly is really tricky. For example "we have biweekly sprint ceremonies on monday and friday" can be very confusing.
There is a tension between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and it has to do with the rate at which the language evolves. Prescriptivism resists language evolution. Decriptivism allows the language to evolve as fast as people wish to evolve it.
Some rate of language change has to be accepted, but it needn't be as fast as if we rejected all prescriptivism.
We each prescribe or refuse to prescribe language rules as we see fit, and thus the language evolves at some natural rate.
> Decriptivism allows the language to evolve as fast as people wish to evolve it.
More importantly, taken to an extreme, descriptivism describes language in the way a map describes the territory. Any time a person speaks and is understood, no matter how badly, end-stage descriptivism has to allow their diction as syntactically and semantically valid in the language in which they spoke. The most you can say is that some expressions are rarer than others (you see "was done well" much more often than you see "was done good").
But this is also a wrong way of talking about language, just as much the old prescriptivist way was wrong. People are not static language replication machines, learning how to speak purely from imitation of their elders and community, and observed from on high by language anthropologists seeking to observe how they behave. They are concept-builders, rule-learners. They have a sense for not just how to speak in particular cases, but also what it is to speak well. It is this public sense of correct speech that is the subject of evolution over time, and is therefore also the proper target for descriptivist accounts of language.
Writing is similar to speech, but in writing most people are even more keyed to correctness, and less keyed to achieving the bare minimum of communication. Rules are stickier. We ought to understand this Wikipedia editor not as a noxious outsider to the evolution of language, who like the anthropologist inserts prescriptivist rules where they are unwanted, but as someone who is part of the normal evolution of language itself and therefore part of the terrain to be described! There have always been people who have been sticklers for particular rules.
In principle prescriptivism is about slowing language evolution, but in practice almost all of the prescriptive rules that people talk about (including opposing “comprised of”) are not based in any historical usage pattern. The prohibitions on ending a sentence with a preposition, “less” before a count noun, etc. are all made up out of thin air.
> The prohibitions on ending a sentence with a preposition, “less” before a count noun, etc. are all made up out of thin air.
Yes, as is not splitting infinitives. All nonsense. But "comprised of" is not nonsense. "Irregardless" is wrong". Etc. Not all prescriptions are nonsense.
> Prescriptivism resists language evolution. Decriptivism allows the language to evolve as fast as people wish to evolve it.
This is nonsense. Do you really believe language is subject to intentional human control?
(Of course if a dictator comes and kills half a million people for things including changing language like it happened in my country, then it is, but this is a very rare exception.)
> Do you really believe language is subject to intentional human control?
Some, yes. You speak roughly the same language(s) as your parents, friends, teachers, etc. Their influence on how you speak and write -especially when you were young- is quite large.
But you and I can -by our own choices- resist some evolutions of the language and foster others. We can be anywhere from pedantic prescriptivists to outrageously innovative and everything in between. Our children, relatives, friends, and colleagues can all take cues from our stewardship of the language -- and vice versa.
Fully agree, same can be said about ever young generation’s slang.
What “bet”, “cap”, “rizz” and others used by the younger population isn’t wrong, it’s different and an evolution of certain terms.
I don’t study linguistics, but I can be sure there are terms we use today and take as normal-speak that were once the center of a younger generation’s slang vernacular.
An extreme example is the word retard. Years ago in normal speak you could say “After the EPA enacted stricter emissions regulations, this initially retarded the development of sports cars until new technology was implemented” other obvious examples are the medical angle of the word.
Today, you could use the word in such a way, it’s technically correct, however you’ll most likely get some odd looks.
Most uses of it today are either in specific comedic circles, or derogatorily towards another person/thing/animal etc
"Better ones are better" is meaningless because there's no objective standard. What I think is better, you may think is worse. All we can say about style guides is, "different ones are different". They reflect the needs of each publication. And Wikipedia's style guide takes no stance in this case. Also, style is about preference, not correctness.
It may not be your personal preferred usage, but it certainly isn't bad usage if a major American dictionary approves.
That's nonsense, not all native speakers have equal verbal fluency. Certainly new words or sentence constructions can be coined for amusement or efficiency and may catch on at scale, but if there were no such thing as correctness then there wouldn't be any such concept as incoherence.
A "systematic" change in the meaning of a word or phrase means that someone used it wrong once and enough people followed them in their wrongness that it became the norm. It's reasonable to say that once a new meaning has been taken up by the majority in this way it's not wrong anymore, but there is also a broad continuum between old usages and majority uptake of new usages where some users of the language in question may reasonably object to the latter.
For instance, I was once CC'd on an email thread at work where a senior leader made an obvious typo in reference to some Thing and everybody else on the thread blindly parroted it. This "alternate" usage was established and used systematically in the local context, but it led to a significant decline in general clarity and interpretability, and it was also not durable beyond the context of that thread. It was a mistake, simple as that.
"Comprised of" is probably past the threshold at this point, much like "rate of speed" and "how <thing> looks like" and so on and so forth. But—and I know this is shocking to some people—"correct" use of language does have significant advantages for communicating clearly, especially in writing. Prescriptivism and descriptivism both have their adherents because neither is right or wrong in the naive absolutist sense—balance is key.
It depends on whether you presume language knowledge to be descriptive or prescriptive. Neither view is right or wrong. For example, I'm a native speaker of C, yet my syntax errors are still errors.
u are looking at this from the pov of a linguist, not an editor...u might think this comment im writing isnt "systematically wrong" or whatever but u wouldn't write a wikipedia article this way
seriously tho if descriptivists had the courage of their convictions they would just stop capitalizing, there's no reason to
I think you have the crux of it... this person has a very long essay explaining why this change makes it more comprehensible to more readers.
This is what an editor should do. What's the problem? Let them spend their time on it if they like, it seems like most times no one even notices the change.
It's not being pedantic if you are doing it to improve real life readability based on real feedback, even if it seems trivial.
Not necessarily true. There are authoritative guides on English (e.g. the Webster dictionary) that grammar is measured up against. In fact, the main reason we have standardized spelling instead of people just writing what seemed right is because people actively tried to enforce a right and wrong way of spelling.
> There are authoritative guides on English (e.g. the Webster dictionary)
This is exactly wrong. Webster's is not prescriptivist; a dictionary describes a language as it is, not as it "should" be (indeed, there is no such thing).
> 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:
Semantic shift is certainly a phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that it should always be embraced or is useful. There's a clear use for unambiguous and Technical language.
If you write a patent, statement of work, product specification, or contract with the wrong word out of ignorance, you only have yourself to blame
I'm fine with people being careful in their usage in contexts where precision matters. I even agree that Wikipedia is probably one of those places.
It's the weird value judgements that people like the author assign to different usages that really bother me. Objectively, "is comprised of" is correct usage. It's the majority usage in books published today, and it's in all the dictionaries.
If TFA had left it at "it's ambiguous" I wouldn't blink, but they had to go off on a rant about how wrong the modern usage is, and that's a problem. It feels elitist and reactionary.
I generally agree with that sentiment. And something like a patent the definition is well understood.
The sentiment that I disagree with is defending an incorrect or at least ambiguous word choice when there is a clear alternative. The strikes me as simple stubbornness.
> Words frequently develop the opposite meaning of what they originally had
My favourite examples, because it also emphasizes some kind of ambiguity in the concept itself, are the english words "host", "hosting", "hospitality", "hostile", "hostage", with roots in the latin "hostis" (enemy), and the indo-european "ghosti" (guest, stranger).
I don't know if it's that simple, and in the case of "comprised of" I think there's good reason to attempt to make a correction. It's not that to comprise is some super common, popular verb that pops up naturally in our day-to-day language. It's relatively rare. My personal opinion is that people believe what they'd probably say normally ("x is made up of y", or "x contains ys" or whatever) sounds too simple in some contexts, so they reach for the the verb they heard some other people use that they presume is more correct and then use it incorrectly. People are conflict-averse and don't often correct their friends/colleagues/clients/whatever so it sticks around. So if the intent is to use a more correct word, surely people would want to know the actually correct way it's used?
And I'm all for "language evolves" - but there's always going to be a time when you correct people. If you have a kid who calls the ambulance the "ambliance" (common one for kids where I'm from) you don't just shrug and say "language evolves", you try to teach them the correct way to speak, spell and write.
I don't know where the line is - what should be corrected and what should be absorbed in to English - but I feel like "comprised of" should be corrected.
You're welcome to tend your own garden, but until we figure out how to have fair elections I would invite all self-appointed language stewards to leave other people's plots alone.
Languages belong to their speakers, and the only way we have to vote at the moment is with our idiolect.
That makes as much sense as saying that "ne... pas" in French is a double negative and therefore "simply wrong" to use as a straight negative.
No -- language isn't math, and English and other languages are chock-full of inconsistencies and seemingly "illogical" things. Language ultimately rests on convention, on real life usage -- not logic. Arguing that a common usage is illogical is fighting against the tide.
"ne... pas" in French is nothing more nor less than the correct way of formulating certain kinds of statements containing a negative. If you left out either of "ne" or "pas" in such a construction, people would either laugh, or assume you were some kind of primitive language generator.
It's absurd that English speakers are so tolerant of incorrect usage. It's partly the pedagogic principle that "All shall have prizes" at the school sports day; but it's significant that if you try to correct incorrect usage, you get referred to literary figures such as poets and playwrights that used some term incorrectly, as if people like (e.g.) Pepys are authorities.
> It's absurd that English speakers are so tolerant of incorrect usage.
Or, one can just as easily say it's absurd that certain pedants are so intolerant of evolving usage.
Language does not proceed by logical deduction. It is shared convention, no more and no less. If a majority of people think a new usage is right, then that's just what the usage is.
When you say "incorrect usage", incorrect according to whom? You? A minority? Why should anyone else take that seriously when they're already communicating just fine?
Or they'll assume you're a native speaker familiar with a given dialect or specific idioms. Dropping "ne" is common in spoken French many places to the point that to many speakers you'll sound stilted and/or old if you included it - the first time I was told (as a teenager) I sounded "old" for using ne..pas was around 30 years ago.
The son in the family I stayed with on on a school trip back then found it hilarious how often I used "ne ... pas" instead of just "pas", e.g. "c'est pas grave" [1] rather than "ce n'est pas grave".
The reverse is possible too: there are some verbs (at least savoir and pouvoir, not sure if there are others) that can be negated just with ne, without pas, although it sounds stilted and old-fashioned. You are unlikely to encounter this in the real world but it does show up in books. For example Dumbledore in the French translation of Harry Potter says “je ne puis” and “je ne sais” a fair amount.
I'm not a native speaker, but I've read that "je ne [verb]" was the standard way to negate in Old French, cognate with e.g. "yo no [verb]" in Spanish. The "pas" was originally only added for emphasis, but over time it became obligatory and the "ne" became less important.
It's almost as if, contrary to what the person three comments up says, languages evolve over time...
> If you left out either of "ne" or "pas" in such a construction, people would either laugh, or assume you were some kind of primitive language generator.
Isn't it common to drop the "ne" in colloquial speech?
“Common” is an understatement. It’s practically universal. You will sound weird if you systematically include “ne”, like you learned to speak by reading books and have never communicated with a real person.
> If you left out either of "ne" or "pas" in such a construction, people would either laugh, or assume you were some kind of primitive language generator.
You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Please learn French before spouting off so confidently about it.
Interesting. If you look at Wiktionary or if you prefer, your favorite etymology dictionary, the word utilize is descended from Latin from the French word utiliser, via the Italian utilizzare which got it from the Latin utilis. All of those words mean to use.
I'd be the last person to say you're wrong. Matters of grammar and usage ultimately boil down to does it feel right and current usage. As is usual with these things, other people have different feelings about it. That's what dialect is I think.
No part of your example indicated the intent was to use the computers to teach children. Teachers can teach adults and they can use computers to do other things. In your examples, excepting your hidden intent, they were synonyms. Do you have a better example demonstrating this?
Nevertheless, "use" is a better word. Using longer words, when shorter words are available that mean the same thing, comes across as pompous or pretentious.
They're not quite the same thing. One example I see online is using "utilize" to suggest that something is used beyond its intended purpose. (I'm not sure I even completely buy that.) But, in general, "use" is shorter and sounds less jargony.
Not entirely. Consists of (without a modifier like "in part") usually strongly implies completeness or functional completeness ("active ingredients") in the subsequent list, comprises is more free to be incomplete.
Also native speaker: I'd say a closer translation would be "this post is based on many good points". Or "founded on".
I don't know how universal this is (I don't see anyone else making similar points yet..), but I use all three phrases because at least in my head they have subtle differences:
* "Comprised of" means the pieces make the whole, or at least the basis for the whole, and are an important part of it.
* "Composed of" drops the "important part of it" from "comprised of".
* "Consists of" is even broader, not only including "parts that make the whole" but also "a unit that can be broken into parts".
The differences aren't always relevant, but meaning is lost if they're treated as the same thing.
Edit: Found two further down on this page who each made one of my points, but not all three, so at least I'm not alone here.
The post isn't making anything, it's just sitting there being read by us. The author, however, made some good points in the post.
Additionally the verb to comprise isn't suitable here either, so it's going to sound awkward no matter how you try to rearrange the sentence. The "composed of" or "consists of" alternatives mentioned in the original page aren't really a good fit either.
There's no need to complicate things: this post contains many good points.
In truth if someone said or wrote any of these sentences, I wouldn't mind whatsoever. I know exactly what they meant and that's what matters. However since we're having a bit of fun, I figured I'd weigh in :)
"This post is comprised of good points" is probably technically grammatical but it's an awful sentence. "This post made good points" works better. Better still would be getting more specific.
"Yeah no" and "No yeah" mean clear and different things, despite being superficially total nonsense. I've probably heard "comprised of" thousands of times in my life to mean "made of." What's wrong with phrases having meaning?
That's my point. If you just look at phrases as meaning the sum of their words then this phrase makes no sense. But it is a phrase that has an understood meaning.
> I think there is a proper use for the verb "utilize": it means "to render useful".
I've never heard of that usage for utilize in my life. In a cursory search, I see that the definition of utilize is "to make use of", which to me sounds the same as "use".
Native, high-level speaker here: "comprised of" is not wrong. You're entitled to your tastes of course, but you'll have a richer understanding of the world if you include the shades in your model.
Thank you for taking a stand against the ever-encroaching scourge of "utilize." That one bugs me almost as much as "in order to" does. (Just say "to"!)
“in order to” and “to” have different shades of meaning, and sometimes different meanings entirely (although I guess you’re right that most instances of the first can be replaced by the second).
The Romanian for "to use" is "a utiliza." Bilingual speakers might find "utilize" more familiar and choose it as such. The same might be true of other languages, and a possible explanation for its popularity.
I agree with you. Frankly, utilize instead of use just sounds finicking. As an engineer, I'd use it in a corporate powerpoint that I make to impress management. These kind of things have no place in Wikipedia.
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.
No, I know, I'm saying that the expected, compositional, interpretation of the phrase (a) exists and (b) is just a slightly archaic passive, and it would still be perfectly cromulent, just backward.
Passive voice is formed with the word ‘by’ not ‘of’.
The verb ‘to comprise of’ can exist and have a different meaning that ‘to comprise’ or its passive ‘to be comprised by’ - and have a different passive (to be comprised of).
Like, the verbs ‘smell’ and ‘smell of’ do not mean the same thing, nor is one the passive of the other.
- I smell roses
- roses are smelled by me
- I smell of roses
- roses are smelled of by me
Hey there, when you are quoting and ending a sentence, you should place the period inside the quotes. I understand if you are new to writing in the English language.
WP for "Wikipedia" is built into the site; most of the internal guidance pages can be accessed via titles such as "WP:WikiProject".
[Edit] I generally don't use such acronyms without spelling the term out in full first. But spelling things out in full every time comes across as wordy and pedantic.
Thanks for the clarification. I wouldn't argue against abbreviations per se. Was just in the mood for a whimsy post.
And, in defense of WP, W would not be a better option really, except for URLs.
Ironically, my locale's WP edition has failed to or didn't want to adopt /w/ instead of /wiki/ as the leading path segment for Wikipedia articles, as opposed to the English edition.
Also, thinking about this makes me want to search for edit wars and discussion about US vs British spelling on Wikipedia.
It's the port in your Wifi over Data box, that hackers can connect their wireless Wifi cable extender to, so you can consummate all the exoteric phonography that the information highway is compromised of.
I don't know the right solution to this problem, but I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society against activist superminorities. Pedants tilting at windmills shouldn't be able to alter the cultural landscape this easily. I am aware that their problem and my problem are privileged "first-world problems". The seeds of the open society carry the germ of this pathology, I guess.
>I don't know the right solution to this problem, but I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society against activist superminorities.
Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0]. If you get rid of the superminority, the website literally couldn't function. The inner workings of Wikipedia are actually a fascinating rabbit hole to fall into, but the takeaway is that this behaviour seems to be ingrained into human nature. Basically, the majority consume, a minority produces, and a minority of the minority produces a lot. You can see this in any participatory system as well, not just Wikipedia.
Oddly enough, in Margaret Mead's case, that seems to mean lying to the world about Samoan promiscuity to rationalize her own adultery (implying that in the "state of nature", whatever that means, it's no big deal), thus contributing in her own way to the groundwork for the disaster that was the sexual revolution.
Coming of Age in Samoa is controversial but the claim that Mead was actively lying is pretty untenable.
The main point of contention is that some of Mead's subjects, 40 years and a conversion to Christianity later, denied having had casual sex as young women and claimed that they were playing a practical joke on her.
Whether they were telling the truth then and if so to what extent they're representative of Mead's other subjects is a thorny issue, to say the least.
> The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles each.
That sounds like the ideal scenario. Any evidence that it is or isn’t this way? I would guess it’s skewed more towards a handful of folks simply writing many articles about things they’re moderately knowledgeable about.
I actually ran a full character-level diff with move detection over the entire wikipedia edit history (few thousand machines) back in ~2008.
The vast majority of content was created by a long tail of users, with a very small minority of users being the last to "touch" a particular piece of text (copy edits, moving things around, etc).
It's a really neat division of labor. Subject matter experts provide the facts from a subject matter-focused viewpoint. Those are known to be rough around the edges, so editors make sure they fit together in a more or less cohesive picture of the world.
As with most human efforts, the emergence of a political layer is inevitable. But overall they seem to be doing a pretty good job keeping their shit together. Even though I have no way of knowing whether the information on Wikipedia is correct as a whole, at least it presents as self-consistent.
>The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles each.
I'm not too sure about that, actually. Wikipedia has a lot of special interest groups to handle niche topics, so I don't think that there's much room for experts outside of the group.
We're talking about totally different minorities here.
Yes, a tiny proportion of Wikipedia users create a vast portion of the content. But that doesn't mean their views are minority views.
If those, say, 1% of users who are contributors, still map roughly to the same distribution of gender, race, nationality, political leanings, etc. as the group of all users, then there's no superminority issue. If they set policy according to their own discussion and voting, we wouldn't expect that to be substantially different from a larger group.
The problem is with superminority views -- if you asked 100 randomly selected users of Wikipedia whether all instances of "is comprised of" should be replaced with "comprises", probably only a tiny minority would agree. This is a superminority viewpoint, which is the whole reason why this story is generating so much discussion.
A superminority viewpoint imposing its beliefs is a problem. While a small group of editors that is merely numerically a "superminority" is in no way a problem, unless they turn out to be substantially unrepresentative of the larger population in their views.
> Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0].
It's more like the minority of the minority does a lot of spellchecking and editing, but it seems, much more plausibly, that a group much larger than a minority does the bulk of writing.
Any discussion of Wikipidia on HN is incomplete without a reference to Aaron Swartz's analysis of how Wikipedia is written:
"[He] concluded that the bulk of its content came from tens of thousands of occasional contributors, or "outsiders," each of whom made few other contributions to the site, while a core group of 500 to 1,000 regular editors tended to correct spelling and other formatting errors.He said: "The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around." [1]
The minority wants you to think that the website wouldnt work without them.
Reality is that their rules are only for you. They dont judge their own edits with same standards. If edits were anonymized tons od admins would get banned.
After your first sentence, I thought you were going to argue the opposite. This person's arguments seem to hold water. Aren't the people that argue with him and want to revert his edits a (very strange) activist superminority?
Maybe we need a defense mechanism against bike-shedding, no matter what color bikeshed one prefers?
Nonsense. Editors will edit based on whatever style guides they use and what's generally considered "proper" usage while respecting the author's stylistic choices as much as possible.
With respect to this case, I'd have to see a given usage in context but I would probably generally leave it as is.
If I'm editing you I'll try to avoid making a lot of changes that boil down to stylistic choice but I will absolutely change things I (and my references) consider wrong.
ADDED: You can of course personally use language however you want. But others will judge you based on that.
The Wikipedia editor here is not allowing personal use, part of their proposal is to edit quotes too - to me it reads as if the person has problems with compulsion and doesn't want to stop themselves from "correcting people" (which is not correction so much as forcing that editor's own personal linguistic predilections on others).
There methods comprise of robbing others autonomy. (Wording chosen purposefully!).
This part of the editor's process bothered me, too. Overall I agree with his premise and have no problem with what he's doing. In fact, I think he is improving Wikipedia with his edits.
But changing quotations seems like a step too far. I think his practice of changing a quotation to a paraphrasing (where it doesn't really matter if the article includes a quotation or not) is fine (if a little obsessive). But actually changing quotations feels wrong to me.
I do agree with his assessment that including people's grammatical/spelling mistakes in a quotation detracts from what the person said, but I don't think the correct move is to change the quotation to something the person didn't actually say. At most, the "offending" part of the quotation should be removed and replaced with correct usage inside square brackets to indicate the changed/added part was not part of the original quotation. But overall I think he should just leave these instances alone.
> There methods comprise of robbing others autonomy. (Wording chosen purposefully!).
I think you are in a way proving the editor's point, though? Purposefully chosen or not (I did chuckle a little), that sentence is garbage, and if I were to read that in something without knowing or realizing it was a joke, I would take your words less seriously. I would think, if you can't even use language properly, and need to "inflate" your words, maybe your ideas are overinflated too.
On a different note, I don't think we should care about people's "autonomy" when we're talking about a resource like Wikipedia. "Letting people write whatever and however they want" is not a positive trait in an encyclopedia.
Fixing "it's" to "its" transparently in many cases is one thing. More significant changes to what someone presumably meant deserves a [SIC]. Something that's not wrong but isn't your stylistic preference? No way.
> More significant changes to what someone presumably meant deserves a [SIC].
“[sic]”, which is always lowercase, indicates something the current author views as (probably) erroneous or otherwise improper that is left unchanged in the quoted text, to emphasize that the author isn’t endorsing the usage/construction so marked. It doesn’t mark a change.
But, yeah, the basic point is to not change a quote unless it's some trivial mistake. (But you can flag it so that it doesn't look like you're the one who may have screwed up.)
Right, and they're free to do so, just don't try to justify it by saying it's "correct". I'm not saying we should write poorly, or deliberately sloppily, just it's at the author or editor's preference.
I'd support this guy if he said "I hate 'comprised of' and so I am changing it where I can", but the idea that there's somehow a logical argument justifying it is silly. Appeal to authority is particularly silly in the context of linguistics.
If you like MLA style, do that. I personally love a little extra diaeresis and the oxford comma, but I wouldn't make them the law.
>and the oxford comma, but I wouldn't make them the law
Oh, I would :-) But I do reluctantly conform to AP style in certain contexts.
That said, there is a certain appeal to authority mindset if you're looking for mainstream non-fiction (and a lot of fiction as well) publication. Maybe "correct" isn't the right term but "accepted practice" or something along those lines which boils down to more or less the same thing.
The rules of French are not really legally defined; that’s a common misconception. Yeah, there is a state-funded cultural organization in France called the Académie française that claims that regulating the language is part of its mandate, but its “decisions” have no legal effect whatsoever and are widely ignored, even by the government and education system.
The contexts are blog posts and press releases often targeted at journalists, who will often copy-paste sections, so standard company stye is to write in a way that conforms to what they use so they don't need to fix it up.
OP discusses this; the language has not really evolved. Certainly there are some dictionaries that acknowledge the newer confusing usage, but always as an alternate.
Also consider the "why": does this phrase pop up more and more often due to misunderstandings and copy/paste? Or is it because people actually want to change the meaning of the phrase and are doing it consciously? I don't see any evidence of the latter.
Language is important. It's the foundation of communication. I think it's noble to push against inadvertent usage changes that make the language more ambiguous.
Put another way: sure, language evolves as people use it differently. But why is it any more valid to push the language toward using "comprised of" in this new way, than it is to push the language to avoid it?
This is not true at all. Merriam-Webster includes it as its second definition of three [1]. It is not presented as an "alternate" or as confusing or incorrect in any way. To the contrary, there is a usage note at the end emphasizing its validity -- how it is "now somewhat more common in general use".
> I think it's noble to push against inadvertent usage changes that make the language more ambiguous.
But there is nothing ambiguous whatsoever about "is comprised of". Its meaning is crystal clear.
> But why is it any more valid to push the language toward using "comprised of" in this new way
It's not, because they're not "pushing" anything. People are just communicating in the same constructions they've unconsciously absorbed, like they do with most of language. The only people "pushing" are people like this Wikipedia editor, who is trying to impose an exclusionary viewpoint that, for example, the editors of Merriam Webster disagree with.
Are you sure? There appear to have been 90k instances of usage in widely read reference material (e.g. Wikipedia, bar this crusade). I'd say that qualifies.
> I don't see any evidence of the latter.
I'm pretty sure people use it based on the meaning they intend it to have, see prior statement for substantial evidence :P
> sure, language evolves as people use it differently. But why is it any more valid to push the language toward using "comprised of" in this new way, than it is to push the language to avoid it?
I don't think anyone but the Wiki editor is pushing anything. I'm saying use language as you like, just don't try to justify your personal crusade based on "correctness", be it moral or technical. I don't care for that style of usage of "comprised of" either, particularly, but I wouldn't try to tell other people how to write, and I think the meaning and purpose of the phrase is perfectly clear.
You do you, but I think it's insane not to want to have more norms around the particular uses of language. We already barely understand each other (see any political conversation or pseudoscientific debate on the internet where words get thrown around in abandon, with an abundance of ambiguous constructions).
The English/American are culturally less prescriptive around grammar, but other languages (such as French) are often much more prescriptive with it.
Having majored in political science it's rare that political arguments are due to a lack of understanding. They're almost always due to just prioritizing things differently.
I think that's true only when both people have a certain degree of sophistication, but in the vast majority of cases involving laypeople, basic theory (including semantics / working definitions for basic concepts) and reading comprehension skills are probably limiting factors.
ur looking at this from the pov of a linguist...this guy is not a linguist, he is an editor...ppl can use language however they want but i dunno if anyone would write a wiki arty the way im writing this comment...even tho u can perfectly understand what im saying
Right, I'm saying he may prefer a style over another style but it's not technically or morally "wrong", and so arguing absolutes is pointless. As you say, it's fully understood, anything beyond clarity of communication moves into the realm of preference and subjectivity. Even within English wikipedia articles, the Simple English version is going to be markedly stylistically different from main line English wiki.
Why is it ok to be prescriptive with things like spelling of words but not grammar or the meaning of words? If people are using words in a way that doesn't make sense to the reader, such as changing the meaning of them to be the opposite like the word factoid, it's not the reader that is wrong by pointing out that the word has a different meaning than intended. I have no problem calling out such use as being wrong.
> Why is it ok to be prescriptive with things like spelling of words but not grammar or the meaning of words?
It's not.
> If people are using words in a way that doesn't make sense to the reader, such as changing the meaning of them to be the opposite like the word factoid, it's not the reader that is wrong by pointing out that the word has a different meaning than intended.
The reader can say "It was unclear", "I didn't like it", or "that seems like it's opposite to what I would expect", but "wrong" is a silly thing to say. None of these things are even absolute within published English literature, let alone just say American, or UK, English literature. Even if you're following a particular style manual things are ambiguous in many cases.
You know, I'll take a very minority POV: overall, Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of reporting the facts. I'll trust what they say about some non-controversial person or event much more than any other media outlet.
Of course it's not perfectly unbiased, and anal super-pedants do make it intolerable to try to contribute. That said, they do at least make an effort to stick to the facts.
I'm not sure about "much more than any other media outlet" but for mainstream non-controversial topics it's probably pretty accurate. It may not be comprehensible for anyone who isn't already an expert, it's maybe pretty thin if the person/subject isn't part of the modern tech and hobbyist zeitgeist, but it's probably not a bad starting point especially if it has a lot of good cites.
The editor here is arguably correct in that the usage he's changing is incorrect.
You may find it pedantic (and I might agree), but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Does tilting at this particular windmill make Wikipedia worse? I would say it makes it better, even if in a very small way.
Even if you don't care about the incorrect usage, I find his argument that some uses are there just to make the prose sound more "intelligent" -- at the expense of clarity and ease of reading -- to be valid enough. I would much rather read "The residents are former New Yorkers" instead of "The population is comprised of former New Yorkers". The latter is unnecessarily complex for a sentence like that.
I'm sure someone can find a completely separate example of this sort of editing that actually is harmful. But the solution to that isn't "ban all edits of this sort".
It doesn’t seem like it’s that easy a task. I’d argue improving grammar and language in an encyclopedia isn’t altering the cultural landscape, I don’t think the usage of “comprised of” is a meaningful cultural artifact that requires embodying in an encyclopedias language style. I’d note the person also allows for people to revert the change without consequence if they feel passionate about the cultural landscape of “comprised of” usage vs generally accepted better alternatives.
I actually kind of admire these folks that do stuff like this. These sorts of obsessions are interesting artifacts of the internet’s cultural landscape.
You need to look at those who edit categories. Wikipedia no longer gives much credence to those who create, research and improve articles. It is now full of people poking around the edges.
There is one editor, BrownHairedGirl, who tags articles with “bare links” (note she does not actually change those links very often), and gets into battles about categories that has driven off dozens of users (if not more). They are the most toxic editor on Wikipedia but have amassed a group of followers who are of the same ilk - people who do nothing but poke at minor parts of Wikipedia but contribute nothing of significance - and will remove anyone who gets on their bad side.
Wikipedia is said to have hit “maintenance phase”. That’s ridiculous, there is a lot more to be writing about. Basically these people are killing the project. It’s a complete tragedy.
Edit: here’s an example of the vicious and petty actions they make - they created a category “Abusive, mean, petty Wikipedians” for people who use a particular category that is never filled in on their user pages. This has been there since 2017. We have one user who calls themselves the “category police” who is currently arguing such a divisive and abusive labeling of editors is quite acceptable. The irony is strong in that one.
Society always has people who contribute to specific things way more than the general population. And not even just generally in specific niches but some people are just highly productive and highly motivated.
I don’t think there can be a system to balance this without harming the wider system simply because these people make up the bulk of the work being done, and enforcement systems usually cause much of the same sort of power centralization, but often worse.
Of course not all of the work by these powerusers is useful but I can’t imagine a system that only blocks the bad work without harming the highly productive ‘good’ people who are trying to be more representative of the public. Plus stereotypically making the rules/processes is the easy part, because people are motivated at the start to fix things, but after it’s in place the actual hard work of enforcing it and doing it right is often neglected… or these same small groups of “powerusers” will also end up running the moderation and use it to explicitly control things even more.
Although those risks/issues has rarely stopped people from trying in the past.
The refrain of the left "what's the big deal, why do you care" is exactly the sort of lazy dismissal that makes people end up resting on their laurels and believing that "one small change" doesn't matter.
We need to get better at pushing back at the first small sign of nonsense, and not let things get really bad before people start to care. Ironically, this wikipedia edit is pretty much the most benign current example of a minority controlling a narrative because nobody cares enough to push back. See all the insane modern language policing.
1. Create a Wikipedia page explaining the confusion here (borrowing from author’s essay). But also ratify the “incorrect” as “not considered harmful and is permissible on wikipedia”
2. Encourage the author to do something that effects more positive sentiment with their time, even if it’s “wrong.” It could be this behavior is compulsive and author has problems controlling it. At least try to steer that energy, and just do not engage in fighting it.
Idk man, some good soul corrected a common language error on a site where many authors are not even native English speakers.
I am happy there are people willing to do the work for free and that Wikipedia is now better. Hopefully he corrects more errors in the future so I am less likely to pick up incorrect language in the future when I read the articles. Sounds like the right solution you are looking for to me.
The solution is to call it what it is - mental illness - and treat it as such.
Being a grammar nazi is one thing, but editing quotes to match a language that stopped evolving in the 1970s definitely oversteps the bound between quirky and actively harmful.
I'd even argue, in the vein of a sibling comment, that willing to label the activist superminorities that run things as mentally ill is very important. They're usually obsessive/perfectionist and workaholics, yet we're supposed to commend them and follow in their lead.
i find grammar obsession on the internet to be insane overall. you ever use the wrong their/there/theyre and have some guy reply with some unhinged comment. such odd behavior
Thats just your opinion. if you understand me and i understand you then were good. my experience with grammar is that it just explains how we talk, like music theory. when your young and learning to speak, you just speak, your parent (probably) don't sit down with a white board and explain noun and complex verbs tenses at the age of four
I understand you, but it's more difficult than if you wrote correctly (according to my arseholish prescriptivist rules, if you like, yes) - you're communicating less effectively by not subscribing to the standard rules; I misread you, take longer to understand your meaning, it takes patience and begins to frustrate.
Also spoken language is looser. You can't hear the difference between "there," "their," and "they're" but your brain fills in the appropriate meaning. When you see it written though, there is a slight mental stumble as you initially parse the word as written, then understand that it's wrong, and make the appropriate mental substitution.
Spoken language is also different in that, as you correctly point out, it is at times more limited in how much information it contains, but also, in other ways it can be much richer in information than the equivalent writing. Things like nonverbal or tonality can contain a lot of helpful or contextually-relevant information that cannot be found in writing.
So writing and speaking, while having a lot of linguistic overlap, are just different beasts.
(Ironically I think my grammar in this comment is not great, but FYI English is not my first language-- I'd appreciate a correction if appropriate)
You can't possibly know whether or not I understood them.
I think I understood them, but I can never be sure, because in order to understand something with improper grammar, you usually need to "fill in the gaps" with the most reasonable assumptions possible, and those don't necessarily line up with your interlocutor's beliefs or intentions.
Putting words in other people's mouths is often required to "lubricate communication along", but it should be done as minimally as possible if the goal is for people to understand each other.
Absolutely nonsensical bullshit. Everyone reading this knows you perfectly understood “were” to mean “we’re” here. Engaging in the fictional universe where you didn’t is a waste of time.
There's also a well-known thing about English in that it's culturally much less prescriptive about grammar than other languages. The American-English philosophy around grammar doesn't necessarily transpose to other grammars around the world.
American English is trying to do away with adverbs entirely! Sometimes I find myself shouting '-ly!' at the screen. (I just wanted to leave that comment here real quick.)
I didn't even look at your profile, if you've said 'real quick' or something similar before (or whatever it is you think I gleaned from there) it's a coincidence.
And in fact why would I have? I was replying to something someone else said in reply to you, not even related really except via parent to your GP comment.
Grammar is many things packed in one. For one, it can signal a bunch of things, like maturity, superficiality, seriousness, intelligence. The lack of tolerance, like in you're example, is likely just someone who wants to vent, not a genuine concern for grammar.
The other thing is that writing on the open internet means that potentially many people will read the writing. Good grammar is borne out of routine, but this only works if the people practice the right thing - if they practice the wrong thing, then next time they'll potentially do the wrong thing by habit. So really, good grammar depends on reading texts with good grammar. It's also how we pick up vocabulary. Putting these things together, I think people owe it to each other, and the collective humanity, that they produce quality writings on public places.
I think your putting to much importance on comments on the internet. These are throwaway thoughts. Non of us are changing the world with our comments here. It's just entertainment.
> I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society against activist superminorities. Pedants tilting at windmills shouldn't be able to alter the cultural landscape this easily. I am aware that their problem and my problem are privileged "first-world problems". The seeds of the open society carry the germ of this pathology, I guess.
Maybe the pathology is this kind of conservativism. I find lack of change - due to knee-jerk resistance and corrupt vested interest - causes far more problems than anything.
There is so much we could do - easy low-hanging fruit - where the only obstacle is (this kind of) conservativism.
I'm finding this entire comment section confusing and I genuinely want to understand what is so offensive about what this editor did. To me this does not look like a problem that requires a solution and I even appreciate the essay (I've always had a hard time understanding the usage of 'comprises').
...yet I'm seeing unironic comparisons to both 1984 and Nazi Germany, so ... what this person did is evil?
I don’t think anyone thinks this person is genuinely evil. I sense people are reacting against what they perceive as a busybody who has a disturbing compulsion to control something that isn’t even an issue.
Even though this person is a lone wolf, their actions feel disturbingly authoritarian. This level of compulsion and control is immensely off-putting to the average person. Anyone who puts this much effort into controlling information seems like someone worth confronting.
The editor is imposing a controversial viewpoint on tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles that is not supported by authority or consensus. Merriam-Webster, for example, disagrees with the editor [1].
It's not so different from if a Brit tried to change every instance of "color" to "colour", or an American changed every instance of "colour" to "color". It would be incredibly annoying, patronizing, and disrespectful.
Wikipedia is not a place for people to wage their private grammatical language wars, and so people are responding in a negative way because the editor is trying to impose their viewpoint by sheer force rather than respecting contributors who choose to use Merriam-Webster's 2nd definition of the word.
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 nationalistic awareness with all its perks.
It was so ridiculous and opinionated that they tried to even enforce the use of "Nagelindiewandschlageisen" instead of using the Swedish word hammer.
They burned all their stuff in the war, but it's somewhat folklore that they were heavily involved with Goebbels and his propaganda in WW2.
They got away with that during the Nuremberg trials so technically this is an accusation from my side.
Culturally I think this is the opposite of what cultures should embrace. Languages will always evolve, and you cannot prevent that.
As a side-note: Those were so puristic people that they even pissed off Adolf Hitler at some point, because they criticised him for using foreign words in his speeches.
We still have Türk Dil Kurumu (Institute of Turkish Language) in Turkey. In their website, their motto is declared as "Our Language is our Identity" (Dilimiz Kimliğimizdir). They proposed so many silly words, at one point people were coming up with fake translations attributed to them and others were believing in those, turning them to urban legends. One such legend is my favorite:
Which can be translated to English somewhat literally as "Bottom pushed, top smoking, multi-person-saddle, bringer and deliverer of people" (My best attempt, perhaps GPTs can do better).
However, the thing about them coming up with fake Turkish roots to foreign words (especially French) is totally true. One such example is "okul" (school) which comes from "l'école" but they long time argued that it came from the Turkish root "oku" which also means to study (among "read" and "send prayers"). There are thousands of "inventions" like these.
The weird trend was (still is!) our tendency as a nation to invent Turkish language roots in words from other languages, which once lead to ridiculous stuff like the Sun Language Theory [0].
IM(not so)HO: All language institutes should be left in the past, as they tend to ignore the organic properties of the languages they are supposed to protect.
I doubt it's been trained on that, here is what it told me:
> I'm sorry, but the phrase "Alttan ittirmeli üstten tüttürmeli çok oturgaçlı getirgeçli götürgeç" appears to be a nonsensical combination of Turkish words. It doesn't have a clear meaning or context.
> try a literal translation for "Alttan ittirmeli üstten tüttürmeli çok oturgaçlı getirgeçli götürgeç"
>> ChatGPT: Sure, here's a literal translation of the original Turkish sentence: "Bring-take with a lot of lower-upper pushing-pulling, with many buttocked and seated ones."
>> As you can see, the literal translation doesn't make much sense in English, and it loses the humor and rhythm of the original tongue twister.
> try a better translation
>> Certainly, here's a better translation of the original Turkish sentence that preserves the humor and rhythm:
>> "Jostle and wiggle with seats too small or too big, to make it through this ride like a true champion of the middle."
>> This translation captures the playful tone and the challenge of the original tongue twister, while using language that is more natural and understandable in English.
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.
> ... find replacements for foreign words, and strengthen the nationalistic awareness with all its perks.
> They created their own "purified" dictionary ...
So, the "Erhaltung" effort was not to preserve existing usage, but to create a new vocabulary aligned with the group's ethno-nationalist agenda. Seems very different from TFA's agenda.
The issue with our digital library is that the search there is not indexed, and most old German texts are not searchable either [1]
You can search for "Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein" or "Atlas der deutschen Sprache" or similar, you'll find references to it but not the scanned books.
Welcome to the age of Digital Amnesia :'( [2]
Maybe the dossier about the burned books of WW2 is a good start to find things about it, but it's kinda hopeless without a search index. Alternatively there seems to be a lend-able copy in the library of Dresden [3] and [4]
I'm rereading Orwell's 1984 and this all seems a bit like Ministry of Truth and its whole newspeak ordeal (of course MT was a bit more absurd - they wanted to get rid of all ambiguity in language also).
The inspiration for Newspeak is Basic English, which is much like Esperanto but with English words (at least it's described as such — I'm not actually very familiar with Basic English myself). Constructed languages had some avid supporters back in the early 20th century, looking to make some constructed language the international language. Though I don't know much about Basic English, the unique looks of Newspeak definitely come, directly or indirectly, from Esperanto's ideas for keeping the vocabulary small and simple. To illustrate, in Esperanto the word for "good" is "bona", "bad" is "malbona" ("ungood"), and "to improve" is "plibonigi" ("to moregoodify").
I was wondering more about why he put newspeak in 1984 as a way for party to controll people minds and eliminate "though crimes". I do not know history of Basic English and Esperanto but it seems very improbable that their creators were aiming at the same goals as Ministry of Truth.
The organization predates George Orwell by around 20 years... so I guess nope ;D
But I agree with the similarities of the Ministry of Truth, and what it wanted to achieve. The issues as I mentioned is that I don't think there's a universal truth to anything; and therefore eradicating wordings or forms of language that are "not good" is a very subjective perspective.
>> The organization predates George Orwell by around 20 years... so I guess nope ;D
I do not understand - OP was mentioning that the organization worked through second world war and was event at Nurimberg trials. An Orwell written 1984 in 1949. What do you mean that this organization predates Orwell ?
I was just insinuating that Orwell might have known about this history (and probably about similar like this) and use this as inspiration for how dictatorships can use purification of lanuguage for their purposes (in case of Orwell it was more about controling "thought crimes" then abount simple national identification).
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. Maybe simple routine work is his way of unwinding from the maddening pace and complexity of the rest of life. Good on him for feeling passionate about something and seeing it through.
We should be grateful there are people willing to do this kind of mundane janitorial work.
I wouldn't call this janitorial work. This seems to me to be less like someone cleaning a building than someone replacing every pencil in the building with a #2 pencil, because they believe that type of pencil is the correct type of pencil to use. They haven't made anything materially better, except by their own rigid definition of what the best pencil is--and maybe there are advantages of using a #2 pencil over a #3 pencil, but if you brought that pencil to work, there's a chance you brought that pencil because you prefer writing with it, and you wouldn't want someone, despite their best intentions, replacing your pencil with a 'better' one. Almost no one is going to look at the graphite and not be able to recognize words because it's a #3 pencil and not a #2 pencil.
In my opinion, this isn't what built Wikipedia, this is what made Wikipedia hostile to new contributors.
When someone goes around "correcting" everyone's language and writes a manifesto about it, that sure is shoving to me. It's not working towards a consensus by trying to convince, it's unilaterally imposing, and creating work for others to undo if they disagree. If that's not shoving, I don't know what is.
Since there isn't agreement on this actually being janitorial work (in the sense that they are not simply enforcing the Wikipedia styleguide), this is not some completely innocent activity.
No, this is in its essence very petty vandalism, an attempt to force his notion of grammar on the entirely of Wikipedia despite knowing this is forbidden. That this forcing is the intended goal is clear from their own description of the editing process, where they admit to never permanently recording articles with authors who do object to the edits. Instead they just record objectors for six months and then try sniping in the edit again in the hope that the author is not there to protect it anymore.
In "Reaction to the project" the author links to a "semi-vandalism" charge. You can read the discussion among Wikipedia editors there if you're interested (spoiler alert - most found it valuable and nobody thought it was vandalism).
That's by their own account. Multiple times they mention they don't do the best of caring about our tracking negative comments. They do however do the opposite. It's important to remember this is written by them and is all from their perspective.
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.
> The whole encyclopedia is built out of this kind of hyper-focused nerding over details.
Absolutely not. It's built out of people writing useful and information articles, not pedantic editing over personal language bugbears.
> These changes don’t make your day worse.
It shows up in people's watchlists and potentially dozens or hundreds of people will need to verify this change; it introduces edit conflicts, it invalidates drafts people were still working on. It absolutely adds work for other editors, and that's fine even for smaller changes (I have many small changes myself) if it actually improves the article, but all of this amounts to little more than "I don't like it".
It's built of people nerding over articles and topics, and not language fascism. This person just has some kind of personal vendetta against a prepositional phrase that 99% of English speakers have no issue with at all. That's not very healthy for wikipedia or him. The funny thing is I -agree- with his take on usage, I just don't agree with him trying to lording it over all of wikipedia.
I love these one-person crusades against present reality. Words mean whatever a critical mass of people want them to mean. For example, the usage of the present tense here:
"Composed of" and "consists of" are better alternatives.
is incorrect. It should read:
Composed of" and "consists of" were better alternatives.
This thread is literally a clout ATM machine for a group comprised of pedants.
Allow me to quote you back to you. "It’s also not really serverless to begin with, because at the end of the day code is being executed on a physical device that many of us might call a “server” [1]
A critical mass of people have adopted the term serverless. Therefore, the term means whatever they want it to mean, right? No sense in swimming against the tide here, correct?
Yes, words mean what people want them to mean if we're willing to shrug our shoulders and accept the new usage or terminology. That doesn't mean it's never correct to fight against sloppy or non-standard usage in the hopes that it won't be considered standard.
That’s great example! That post is an unserious riff as a response to another post that meant to assert the correctness an individual’s personal definition of a term on what I found to be tenuous pedantic grounds.
I think in the case of "serverless" we still share a common understanding of what the term means, even if the term itself is misleading. This "comprised of" issue is different in that it can easily cause misunderstanding between archaic and modern users of the phrase, where meaning is inverted.
Semi-related, it always bothered me that we use the term "wireless" for something that still has wires (just not between the endpoints). Though I don't object, or have a better alternative, and I get the logic of calling it wireless.
The better alternative is cordless, no? At least some products do use that (e.g. cordless mouse). Of course, wireless is now so widely used it might not make sense to fight it :)
The problem here is the ambiguity. Someone who uses the original meaning of comprise will interpret a sentence in the opposite way of someone using the new. "America comprises many states and territories" -> "Many states and territories are comprised of America" have the same meaning with the original definition. With the new definition, you'd have to invert both sentences.
This is called a Janus word because it can be it's own antonym. There are other Janus words, like "table" as in "to table a topic for discussion", which means opposite things in American vs British English. The author touches on the fact that that's a regional distinction, but there is no such regional distinction for comprise. Therefore it makes sense for a website like Wikipedia to pick a single form, and the original is still more widespread than the new.
Biweekly is not its own antonym but it means two completely different things (every other week and twice a week) which for me as rendered it useless since you cannot know which meaning is intended.
Yeah the RAE is super useful to end debates on what a word means, thats it. I see no issues with language not "evolving enough". Spanish written/talked a century ago is different than what it's spoken presently, even if the words mean the same.
What I don't quite understand is the resistance. It's a fact that some people (and I mean readers, not the editors) don't like, understand, and/or accept the new meaning of this word, whether we like it or not. Whereas everyone should be agreeing that the alternatives are fine. So if you have an alternative everyone is fine with... it seems like a no-brainer to use it? When you have something that everyone is happy with, why insist on an alternative that some people hate?
Why take this personally? This is not a personal battle. It's isn't about disliking the way a person communicates, nor about it being right or wrong. It's about the way Wikipedia articles communicate, namely, in a way that hopefully minimizes friction for their readers (whom it's there for - it's not there for the editors), without compromising on accuracy. I would think editors really ought to be able to distinguish "I like this word more" and "I think this word is best for readers".
There are a billion of us speaking the language. It's a little presumptuous to tell a billion people what to do and there should probably be some amount of default resistance.
There's 380 million native speaker of this language, but another billion non-native speakers. If this change helps that latter billion, should the former 380 million object?
(On a personal note, as a non-native speaker of English I've always found the phrase "comprised of" confusing. I infer the "directionality" based on context but am unsure how to use it correctly myself.)
Nobody is telling a billion people what to do though? We're just talking about what word to use in an article edited by a handful of people. The billion people can keep using whatever words they want.
Do you really believe the loss society would suffer from editing "comprised of" in Wikipedia articles is actually comparable to what it would suffer if they discriminated against half the population on TV?
I can only speak for myself, but the actual phrase “comprised of” is the least interesting thing to discuss when it comes to this topic.
I am fascinated by a single person taking up the cause of “correcting” the language of others based off of their personal linguistic aesthetic preference.
I don’t see many people saying “I often have to stop at the words ‘comprised of’ and reevaluate the meaning of the sentence that I’m reading lest I completely misunderstand it.” This isn’t actually in practical service of clarity, it’s an exercise in preserving a sense of meaningful posterity — a deeply personal and sentimental endeavor despite what “reasons” one is able to elucidate.
But again, this isn't even about correcting others' language. People are fine to use whatever language that serves them personally well in their lives - but this isn't about that. It's about writing encyclopedia articles in a way that's best for their readers. Every comment I'm reading here so far seems to insist this is somehow personal toward the author and correcting them, whereas it really isn't.
> It's about writing encyclopedia articles in a way that's best for their readers.
This sentence contains a load-bearing “best”. The Wikipedia editor’s contention is that they have established the canonical “best”, and it is that contention that is being scrutinized.
"Best for readers" is not particularly subjective here. We're talking about an encyclopedia whose audience is the entire English-speaking population. Its #1 job is to communicate relevant information on each topic clearly and accurately to the broadest audience in each language - not to match anyone's preferred terminology, write Shakespearean prose, or push the boundaries of the language. We already have multiple words that are perfectly well-suited for use with the intended meaning - we don't even have that luxury with so many other words. Deliberately picking a word that confuses some readers and annoys others just introduces problems and friction where there don't need to be any.
> "Best for readers" is not particularly subjective here.
This is correct. It is exactly the same amount of subjective as the word “best” normally holds. Since there has never been a reproducible measure of best-ness in any objective sense of anything linguistic, it’s squarely in the territory of subjectivity.
If by “best” you mean “understandable to virtually all readers” then “comprised of” and “composed of” are equally “best”
If best-ness is measured by something other than usefulness, then the person that decides the new set of weights with which to weigh best-ness is performing a personal and subjective act. “Orthodoxy to a standard of English as cited by me in context of the year x” does not automatically qualify something for extra best-ness points.
I will gladly entertain the issue of “comprised of” somehow lacking in accuracy with a person that is genuinely confused by its inclusion in a sentence.
While you could certainly argue that “words mean what people think they mean”, that is not a reason to use words in ways that are CURRENTLY considered wrong, especially not in a lexicon.
If you want to change the meaning of a word, that’s fine, and maybe in a few decades you will succeed, but until you get enough people on board you will only cause confusion.
The author means “composed of” and “consists of” are better phrases to use in general (i.e. according to style guides), not were better phrases exclusively for use on his Wikipedia project. We know this for sure because in the “Quotations” section the author says that he changes “comprised of” to “composed of” or “comprises” in quotations under certain circumstances. He is not wary of using “comprises”.
The author also indicates that this work is still ongoing and meant to be evergreen.
I'm pretty sure it's a joke: those were better alternatives but they're equally valid now and it's time for the author to let the language change and move on.
Yeah, I see that now. Instead of italicizing the word “were” to place emphasis like you did, OP italicized most of the quote and not the word that needed emphasis. Ha.
For this reason, I thought his “ATM clout” statement meant the opposite of what he meant.
Whether a language has a governing body is irrelevant to whether you should attempt to use clear, easily-understood language. The concerns apply equally in French and English.
If words don't matter, then ignore the edits. People tend to copy what they see. If they see it written with the original definition, maybe that's what the hivemind will adopt. I don't see a problem with that and I don't see the point in attacking people that care. I'm sure you have things in your life you care about.
No, the point is words do matter, and they mean what people think they mean. Not people from 100 years ago from a prestige university who wrote a dictionary. Languages are fluid, they change and when they do change the present reality is the way the language is spoken.
Obviously there's no universal agreement on which phrase is correct. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having a discussion. I don't know how many people we're even talking about. I'm certain the group that uses "comprises" instead of "comprised of" is not entirely "people from 100 years ago from prestige university who wrote a dictionary."
I understand languages change, which I think is an argument for the edits. If the language pivoted one way, pivoting back is just as valid a change as any other. "Comprised of" and similar phrasing doesn't come out of the ether. They build in popularity as they propagate through writing. There's a big snowball effect. I suspect going forward, you'll see "comprises" or "consists of" because people just copy what they see. Most don't have a strongly formed opinion about which phrase is better.
Personally, I view writing as a craft or skill like any other. Writing is different than speech and always has been. There's a huge qualitative difference in text that has been edited and text that is streamed out of someone's head. The former is almost always clearer to understand. Consequently, if someone points out a grammatical issue to me I say "Oh, TIL, thanks for letting me know" and then I adapt and go on with my life. My bias is to the established norm, not arguing that I'm riding the wave of a linguistic revolution. If I have an open question on something, I'll consult an established resource, just like I would in any other field or craft.
I think the problem is people get embarrassed when they're told they're using the language incorrectly. I get it. I've been there. It's true that English does not have a governing body like French, but I don't see that as a compelling justification for redefining terms or just arguing that nothing can ever be wrong.
How do we decide whether someone is using a word incorrectly, or if we should update our present reality?
Another question: are there places where accuracy and precision are more important than others? Would an encyclopedia be one of those places? I'll reveal my cards here: I believe so.
I am happy that you brought up accuracy _and_ precision!
Somewhat humorously I think a good chunk of the disagreements here come from people treating those concepts interchangeably. Attempts to apply mathematical reasoning to language and interpretation are doomed to fall into similar traps.
This thread is proof of the opposite, in fact. Since neither "composed of" nor "consists of" generate 300+ comment Hacker News threads, they are plainly better.
This 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.
No one seems to understand Wikipedia operates as a system of lords and serfs, where a powerful few pull this crap all the time.
Most relevant example I can think of is when Mac OS X was renamed and stylized to "macOS" someone went and systematically did a find and replace all instances of "OS X" to macOS even in situations where it made absolutely no sense as the article was explicitly talking about prior versions. It was like rewriting history in real time.
Imagine if someone went into a library and started editing history books with a Sharpie to reflect future events.
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?
"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.
I'm not talking about people who are unfamiliar with the term xerox, meaning 'photocopy' (which has been in use this way for decades.) I'm talking about people who object to the use of this term because the Xerox company hates it (they could in principle lose their trademark because of it, but that's not my problem.)
There are probably hundreds of articles that mention macOS. What are you suggesting that they do, edit them all individually by hand? That could take months. If more than half of the instances deserve to be updated, then replace all saves time. You can always check the diff and undo any damage.
I think it’s a balance based on harm of not changing vs harm if changing incorrectly.
I’m this example, there very little perhaps no harm of not changing because it’s just a corporate brand and the corporation cares and if they cared, they would edit.
The harm of incorrectly changing means information is wrong and makes understanding wrong and readers either have the wrong knowledge or spend time researching and correcting something they normally wouldn’t.
I don’t think the goal is absolute accuracy of cosmetic branding, I think the goal is accurately capturing humanity’s information to improve human understanding and knowledge.
That's not nearly as irresponsible and illegal as editing a weather map with a Sharpie to reflect a fictitious future natural disaster and cover up lying in a tweet.
>Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both.
Hmm, I suppose I'm inclined to agree with you here.
If Wikipedia chooses not to adopt a style guideline on matters like this, his little quest to robo-edit this phrase is unrepresentative of Wikipedians.
They’re enforcing a style that’s not in a work’s style guide.
That’s a total noob move for pedants.
A more at weight pedant would work on changing the style guide.
This is the equivalent of a self appointed hall monitor yelling “no skipping in the school hallway” when there’s no rule against skipping. The fact that some people don’t like skipping and that skipping is dangerous is not relevant, the place for that discussion is for the rules nerds in authority to change the rules to disallow skipping.
What worries me about this approach of one person is that they can say “I yelled at people 90k times to stop skipping therefore it’s important and we should change the rule based on all this anti-skipping activity.”
> A more at weight pedant would work on changing the style guide.
Language pedantry is deprecated in Wikipedia. WP is resolutely descriptivist.
I regret that; I'm fully on-board with the notion that language changes. But I'm not OK with the idea that there are no rules at all. Humpty Dumpty was wrong; English is not a language where any string of words could have any meaning.
Moral, no. But they might influence e.g. textbooks and legal drafting. That ordinateur is not ordinary and l'informatique isn't always very Informative. Unless I am mistaken both English words coming in from the French?
I like the French language; I was once fluent (when I was 6).
So when I was sent on a course to do with computers in Paris, I said that my French was up to it. Wrong! My presence on the course was seriously disruptive, because French technical jargon (which I didn't learn at age 6) is unrecognisable to people who haven't learned that jargon in France (nobody else uses it).
For instance, Chinese/Eastern medical jargon is objectively more readable than Western terms (unless you are fluent in Greek and Latin), but that doesn't mean you'll be able to understand them without some prior exposure.
I apologise; I routinely discount anything that is in a language that I can't read, and isn't available in translation, which means an awful lot of stuff from the far-east.
I assumed doctors everywhere had built an informal consensus to use English, with terminology derived from classical greek; rather as pilots and air-traffic controllers all use English.
l'informatique, as a French person, has always failed to capture my imagination as the same way as Computer Science. I wish Informatics was what the Anglosphere had selected because I think it sounds pretty groovy
Since the topic is “who defines English”, it’s useful to list our experiences with Académie Française.
- Seats can only be replaced at death, which explains the advanced age. I generally think old people have more experience than younger ones, but opinions vary, and youngism and modernism are a thing.
- The first woman in the Académie, in 1980, was Marguerite Yourcenar, and she probably was the most non-feminist woman they could choose.
- Recently they opposed the “français.e.s” style of writing, sticking to the classic “français(e)s” or “ladies and gentlemen” inclusive writing. It made an uproar because the first one is described as the only inclusive one by feminist organizations, who like to forget that we included women before they were born. So we reached a fun state where the government uses the feminist one, the Académie says it’s not French, all organizations that want to please women align with the government, but I assure you I never receive management-oriented document in feminist writing, I rarely receive resumes or cover letters in feminist style, nor would I accept them if I got them (political militantism doesn’t make a good employee, especially if they pretend including women is a new thing).
Any other fun story about the moral upstanding of the Académie Française would be interesting too.
Sounds like you have an ax to grind. The whole comment comes of as very dismissive of the feminist movement (which might be justified, I know nothing about feminism in France).
> [..] nor would I accept them if I got them (political militantism doesn’t make a good employee, especially if they pretend including women is a new thing).
I don't know what to make of this, you'd reject candidates because they used dots instead of parenthesis, citing political militantism?
Written language should be pronounceable - it's a written rendition of a spoken language. Even math formulae are pronounceable. How are you supposed to pronounce “français.e.s”?
Not really the main point of my comment, but okay.
Firstly, mapping symbols to sound is arbitrary and based on convention.
I don't speak French, but I wouldn't say français.e.s is that much worse than français(e)s, pronunciation-wise. But I do agree that -.e.s is a bit odd. Kinda like w/ and w/o in English. I mean, seriously, why isn't it w. and w.o. like any other abbreviation.
Evolution isn't unidirectional. English reached what it is today not only through the influence of people using words with new meanings but also with the force of people mandating style, taste and opinion. You wouldn't use 'normalized' if it wasn't for Noah Webster calling the shots.
Moralising about caring about style is itself prescriptivism.
Sure, but why should people who can’t use the language properly () be an uncontested force in that evolution?
() If we can’t say that “comprised of” is objectively wrong, then what _can_ we say about English? Should we accept “bought” as a legitimate past tense of “bring”? Sometimes people are just making a habitual mistake. It happens to me, too.
If it became common usage, yes? If most people make "a habitual mistake", then by whose authority of it a mistake?
> Sure, but why should people who can’t use the language properly (*) be an uncontested force in that evolution?
How do you think English and all other modern languages formed? If some authority were able to stop people who can't use a language properly from evolving it, the people on the British isles would be speaking Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, etc. today, not English.
We can rather tidily solve this by saying orthography and writing systems are artificial methods of representing the spoken language which have prescriptive rules. English spelling certainly shows that it's not difficult to retain many spellings that no longer accurately reflect the pronunciation of the word, if they ever did in the first place. On the other hand, preventing grammatical changes or semantic shift in words over time is impossible. Nobody's ever managed that (perhaps we could find some exceptions among languages that are used in religious or ceremonial contexts primarily and not as someone's regular means of communication).
It's a distinctive feature of English that spelling and pronunciation are only loosely related. It's because of the history of the language; and of the country, for that matter.
This is a completely different example, as this is only a spelling mistake/difference. When these people write "break", they clearly mean "brake". They are not adding the meaning of decelerate to the verb that means to tear into pieces.
The evolution of writing is separate from the evolution of language in general. Read and read are still different words even if they are written the same. If the spelling "brake" for declaration fell out of favor and "break" was used for both words, this wouldn't change anything about the English language. The two are already homophones, and they would be far from the only homographs in English.
I actually think it’s close enough that they could be mistaking the root meaning; think of ‘break’ in terms of elemental forces - a windbreak, a breakwater, a firebreak - think of how ‘taking a break’ is slowing down, is decelerating, is ‘braking.’ Breaks slow the movement of energy through a medium. Brake is a pretty easy mistake to make if you’re not sure which is which.
When some say "I laughed so loud I literally rolled on the floor", they do not, in any way, mean "I laughed so loud I figuratively rolled on the floor". Instead they mean "I laughed so loud, that it was almost like I was literally rolling on the floor". It is merely used as a generic augmentative: the phrase has the same basic meaning with or without "literally", but it gains more emphasis with it. The fact that it happens to apply to a figurative usage of "rolling on the floor" is mostly a coincidence.
Its just like "very" (which is a contraction of "verily", truly) has been adopted as an augmentative and lost its original meaning of "truly".
But no one uses ‘using “literally” to mean “figuratively”’ to literally mean ‘using “literally” to mean “figuratively”’, either. Instead they mean ‘using “literally” in the context of a figurative usage’, as you point out—the censure of which is warranted by its being a lazy cliché. The augmentation is not generic; the coincidence is feigned in the service of irony.
Lots of people do use literally, which manifests by them complaining that it is becoming a self-antonym or that it's losing its meaning. Is it a lazy cliche? Probably. Is that a reason to complain it's hurting the word literally? Obviously not.
You would think it would be relatively uncontroversial to anyone who's read an older text full of "thous" and "yes" that sometimes the way English is used changes over time.
That said, I think McWhorter's observation that much fulminating over language usage is sublimated classism is an astute one.
> That said, I think McWhorter's observation that much fulminating over language usage is sublimated classism is an astute one.
It's fine in general, but it can't really apply here. This is some people imagining a difference that doesn't exist and then enforcing it on other people whose identities are unknown. Social class has no role to play in the process, except that this is the same behavior that, in other contexts, hardens class boundaries.
In other words, my analysis would be that people are motivated to engage in this behavior without knowing why, and the ultimate reason is to enforce class boundaries, but here they're just going with their instincts even though there isn't a class boundary to enforce.
I don't agree. They may not be conscious of it but the target here is people who didn't have the "right" education letting them know to avoid this phrase.
I accept his argument but it is tilting at windmills. Is it valid to engage in mass erasure of a historical record to suit outmoded ideas? The issue here is that an existing word has acquired a new usage and the old guard isn't happy with the change. There was once much grousing about youths failing to properly conjugate second person pronouns. Now it's anachronistic to use them.
> () If we can’t say that “comprised of” is objectively wrong, then what _can_ we say about English?
Well, a lot of things. You can't say "the baby seems drinking the milk." Even though it's perfectly comprehensible, every English speaker will agree that "the baby seems to be drinking the milk" is the correct way to express this. Avoiding "comprised of" is a "rule" where we can't identify any dialect where everyone agrees on it.
What about it is objectively wrong?
Semantics? There are plenty of words that contain 'of' in the definition, yet are used with of "Because of" being the primary example, and afaict is allowed on Wikipedia.
Grammar? "Possessed of" "descended from" etc. This is also very common.
‘Of’ is not itself the problem. The problem is that the direction has flipped from the original usage. It’s like if instead of “my book collection includes all the classics of Russian literature” people started saying “my book collection is included by all the classics of Russian literature”
> why should people who can’t use the language properly () be an uncontested force in that evolution?
For the same reason people with different opinions should still be allowed to vote.
Also it's not an uncontested force, you are free to vote for the "correct" use of the language by actively using it yourself in that way and trying to convince others. Just like everyone else.
In 200 years people might learn "should of" in school, just like we today call that one symbol "ampersand". And they will find some new word to complain about, just like probably every generation since at least middle english did because it was all the "correct" version of the language to them.
I'm curious if that's mainly specific to English. As an Arabic speaker, tremendous care and effort has been taken to preserve Fuṣḥā (formal/High) Arabic throughout the centuries. Language and conjugation that sounds wrong is often shunned or mocked, even though it may partially be spoken in day to day speech in certain contexts. However, the distinction is always there, and such language will not be accepted in official discourse, let alone avenues like poetry and literature.
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.
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 comprising data used by said software application, comprising the steps of:
providing a configuration processing library, said configuration processing library comprising ...
===================
You almost never use "consisting of" in writing claims.
A claim for an invention "comprising" A, B, and C also generally claims inventions that include other elements. Such claims are usually within the statuary categories of processes, machines, or articles of manufacture.
A claim for an invention "consisting of" A, B, and C, however, does not generally claim inventions that include other elements. Such claims are usually usually within the statutory category of "compositions of matter" which includes such things as useful drug or chemical mixtures.
Here's a link to the relevant U.S. Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) section:
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" is the cleanest way of saying what I want to say.
And yes, this was an actual example from my work and I discussed it through because I feel strongly about it :-)
Yes, for whatever reason "is comprised of" feels like a natural, abeit rather technical/formal, expression. It reads clearly, something I'd expect to see in technical documentation or an encyclopedia article or non-fiction book.
Whereas "comprises" feels halfway archaic when I read it, like it's the way an elderly British academic might speak, or something only used in legalese. Somebody using "comprises" in writing strikes me as a little odd, a little bit pretentious.
I'm not saying whether any of this is right/wrong, it's just the connotations I've absorbed.
I would object to the sentence "A proton is comprised of three quarks" on scientific grounds rather than grammatical ones. Only a tiny minority of the mass of the proton is in the three constituent quarks.
As a non-native English speaker, I appreciate pedantic editors like this one a lot. When I read Wikipedia, I want the text to be easy to understand and consistent with the rest of Wikipedia and when I edit, I want people to improve what I wrote. I wish everything I wrote had a copy-editor as pedantic as Wikipedia power users.
Some people are complaining about overly zealous editors who delete a lot of and as an Inclusionist [1] I understand the sentiment. I think deleting information from Wikipedia is pretty bad. But being pedantic about English is not deleting information, it's improving the transmission of information.
I don't agree with you. Comprise is a directional word, similar in that sense to surjective. If someone were to write injective when they mean surjective, I might be able to correctly interpret the intended meaning based on context, but that doesn't make the language consistent and it serves as a hurdle to understanding the text.
I'm quite happy to see the (sic) in quotes. Without, I'd read the quote and stumble over the incorrect would and would think "wait, did they really say that or has it been transcribed wrongly?". With the (sic), I'm that matter doesn't even arise. I understand it is the exact phrasing of the author and go on. Also, I know whom to attribute this to. Did I read the exact transcription of an hazily author, or a hazy transcription of an exact author?
Now please do same for "factoid". The recent inversion of the definition of factoid is a much bigger problem. The term originates from medical science and means "a FALSE fact that is believed to be true after appearing in print". But some journalists miss understood it to mean "a small, but TRUE fact." Their new definition was false, but is now believed to be true after appearing in print.
So, the modern definition of factoid is, itself, a factoid.
Making this, er, fact well known will be useful to future historians, who, when they encounter the word in early 2nd millennium texts, are going to have to puzzle over whether or not the factoid mentioned is actually meant to be true, or false.
Edit, btw, the suffix "oid" means "resembling", so, a factoid is something resembling a fact. Therefore, factoid contains its own definition; and we still butchered it.
You're incorrect about the origin. According to Merriam-Webster [1]:
> We can thank Norman Mailer for factoid: he used the word in his 1973 book Marilyn (about Marilyn Monroe), and he is believed to be the coiner of the word.
But who cares? A word totally invented just five short decades ago quickly morphed, as MW continues:
> The word has since evolved so that now it most often refers to things that decidedly are facts, just not ones that are significant.
Why should Norman Mailer's made-up definition get precedence over the people who actually use it? Just because you coin something doesn't mean you own it. I don't think future historians are going to be confused. Never in my life have I encountered the word "factoid" used in Mailer's sense, until reading your comment. The new definition has long since taken over, long live fun little facts — long live factoids!
“Fact” related words have always had a divergence. Latin factum verb means to do. Various words fall on the objective aspect of action (fact, factual) while others fall on the more subjective “artificial” aspect (factitious, factoid)
The family of the word “act” has similar divergence from similar Latin word actus
Funny to see this on the front page of HN. I literally just went down this rabbit hole an hour ago from twitter. I found this article to be among the most interesting related commentary...
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.
Firstly because it makes me laugh, but also it's because it's actually gatekeeping other people's language that is excluding and antisocial. I firmly believe that we ought to accept the language that others use when the speakers intention is clear, even if they "don't speak good". The uneducated don't deserve scorn by default just because nobody rapped them across the knuckles when they used "coz" instead of "because". And that's ignoring even that many of these grammatically incorrect but often used phrases come from minority groups and shitting on people for using them is actually a subtle avenue for (probably unintended) racism.
It's never too late to learn the meaning of a new word. Why just yesterday I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo, where the author used "felicity" in a context I'd not seen before. Fortunately in my very pocket was a powerful device that includes a dictionary unsurpassed in the history of mankind, and thus my brief ignorance was swiftly overcome! Perhaps the author meant to exclude me? Oh dear...
A true hero. I respect their efforts and wish them well.
Wikipedia moderation/editor gang continues to set new records for anal-retentiveness and obfuscated motivations but as long as I can keep slurping up enwiki-pages-articles dumps, I'll leave them alone and wish them well.
I just hope that they don't wake up one morning and realise they've wasted years of their life on some trivial crusade. Actually, that could apply to a lot of us on HN I guess :)
It is interesting that the account hasn't been flagged as a "single purpose account." I had an account in the past. I made two edits before people who disagreed with my edits started screaming WP:SPA[0]. It really soured my interest in contributing.
Wikipedia rules and policies are wielded as weapons more than they're used for their intent, or even as they're written. This account hasn't been flagged because more people defend it than attack it.
I am personally a rabid descriptivist, but I still find myself somehow sympathetic to this editor's cause. Much like "literally", losing the "official" meaning of "comprise" would leave us (i.e. English speakers) without a word which uniquely captures that meaning.
People will use words however however they will, and that's their absolute right. And without pretending that the aforementioned unique quality should (or even could) justify enforcing one meaning over the other in the English language at large, I think that it's fine to have different standards for different contexts, and that Wikipedia is a context whose need for precision and clarity justifies some pedantry.
If this guy's willing to put in the legwork, more power to him.
I hope he never has to read a US patent where "comprised of" is almost a required usage not only in the spec, but in the claims! It's expected by the examiners and demanded by patent lawyers as a term of art as interpreted by an appellate court.
The term "comprises" and/or "comprised of" has a specific usage in patents. Comprising means that at least all of the listed elements must exist, but other elements that are not mentioned in the claim may also be present. This in turn allows for dependent claims.
The alternative term is "consists" and/or "consists of", which means that only the listed elements may be present. It is used almost exclusively when claiming chemical or molecular formulas.
It's weird I suppose, but in anything other than a very formal (legal, medical, scientific, education, marketing?!?) contexts I find correcting another fluent speaker's english to be (especially colloquialisms, grammar, and word choice) just wrong. You can add context to it, but not really correct.
Unless they're a dear friend, and they knew what they meant to say better than you. A person is expressing their feeling/opinion/interpretation in their vernacular. Yes, it is probably stream of consciousness, but that is exactly what it is, and just changing one word or phrase doesn't help make it clear.
I suppose wikipedia is edumacational so I guess I understand, but unless he's really reading all of the surrounding context of 90k pages (unlikely) then he certainly risks making embarrassing errors.
This is one of those issues where I have strong feelings that are in deep conflict. I agree that grammar / usage pedantry can be bad in many ways, that language evolves and you have to accept that.
On the other hand... there's value in the stance that words mean things and lazy usage that leads to "well, people use it this way now so we're going to update the dictionary" is frustrating and not for the good.
I like it when people use comprise correctly. "The book series comprises 20 novels and 5 novellas" or "the Tarot deck comprises 78 cards." I don't think it's a big win that lazy usage has led the various dictionaries to just throw up their hands and accept the other usage.
But I also understand that after seeing comprise used the other way all the time, it seems silly to argue against it after a point. It's a form of disagree and commit, I suppose - you have to know when you've lost the argument and sticking with a specific usage has no virtue.
The hill I'll die on is "then" and "than," though. In the past 5 or 10 years I've noticed a creeping trend of people writing "more then" rather than "more than." "Then" should be used for time, "than" is used to compare things. "More then" makes no sense as a comparison. But, at some point, it started becoming a more and more common error and now I think people honestly think it's correct because they've seen it online so much. Probably driven by autocomplete.
I could totally understand going on a Wikipedia rampage and replacing every instance of "more then" that exists.
As a side note, I find it hilarious that discussing proper English usage with technical folks - who are often deeply passionate about the correct way to do this or that in their area of expertise - are usually like "oh, that's not important. Grammar and spelling are stupid. I can't be bothered to learn that." But God help you if say "container" when you mean "container image" or something like that, because you'll get a lecture on how absolutely nothing you've written past that can be taken seriously because you got a tiny technical nuance wrong.
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 (1999). The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. Three Rivers Press. p. 80.
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
So if most readers are not really confused by the incorrect usage ("comprised of") and they understand roughly what is being said through context, and no readers learn the correct usage of "comprised" because this editor is simply erasing it.. then what is actually being achieved here? If the editor were correcting the bad usages then I would likely consider this a service to the public but as it stands they're just perpetuating ignorance. In any case though, I think I agree with those calling this a waste of time, time that I think would be far better spent reworking articles for https://simple.wikipedia.org/.
Yes I understand; no it is obviously not "fine". I'm not sure what your point is, because I'm not saying to leave "breaks" there. My POV is that changing your sentence to
>"I upgraded the bits that slow my car down and my car slows down a lot better now."
does not help anyone learn that brakes is correct and breaks is not.
When you see good language use in writing it communicates its own sense of quality. This differentiates low-value sources where some people communicate without an appreciation of the minutiae of the language.
Now for forum comments or low-value writing it's not an issue, but you can argue that having someone who is experienced with using a style guide and communicating consistently adds some authoritativeness to the publications.
In the case of Wikipedia that is a valid thing to aim for.
The problem with your sentence is you are simply misspelling what a person said. The comprise example, they are actually saying comprise. It is a different word!
This felt like an addition to ward of anticipated backlash. As if the author was aware their point might not be received favourably. Hmmm.
I reject the argument that this term is bad because its origins are messy. Similarly a lot of the points put forward here seem like justifications for style rather than actual points (yes - even those ones about supposed clarity).
Are there any profiles of Wikipedia editors? I have to admit that they seem like another breed to me. I don't even bother editing Wikipedia, not that I ever did in quantity, just as I saw things. Everytime I have, even to correct some clear error, it is usually immediately reversed or removed altogether (things as simple as correcting the title of something). They have very strange conventions and their own Wiki language in terms of how they speak in comments and edit articles.
You can't, Wikipedia is pretty much entirely pedantry at this point.
To give an example: a while back a semi-notable object in my local area burned down. It has a short Wikipedia page of a few hundred words, but it is not something anyone would actually care about. At 02:00AM (in the middle of the night) I added this to its Wikipedia page, citing a Tweet from the official fire department.
Five minutes later the entire addition was removed, simply stating that "Twitter is not an acceptable source". Mind you, this is not an official policy: it is usually not allowed, but there are exceptions for instances like this. It was added back with less detail later on by a different user, who didn't even bother to cite any sources.
So yeah, don't bother trying to contribute to Wikipedia, unless you are willing to fight for every single edit.
If the Tweet that you cited was indeed from the official account of the local fire department, then the editor who reverted you was wrong. Twitter accounts are mostly unreliable sources, except when they are reliable: that is, when an official or verified account gives information about themselves. See WP:ABOUTSELF and WP:SPS. The same goes for any such social media platform: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, whatever.
In fact, there are many TV news outlets who have official YouTube channels -- why wouldn't these be acceptable as reliable sources, just like a newspaper or a live TV broadcast?
It is absolutely pointless to bother contributing to Wikipedia. Either it’s so notable someone else will do it, or you’ll get steamrolled by some out of control editor.
The reasoning in that essay comprises pedantry and poor judgement. Language reflects usage. Accepting that a particular usage has existed for hundreds of years, but claiming it is too novel to be correct is quite bizarre.
Language correctness should not be just about usage; ease of understanding and aesthetics are also important. "Comprised of" arguably fails on both counts.
>The Completed Music Video: In November 2013, "Weird Al" Yankovic asked me to direct an animated video for "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" about the supposed abuse of proper language.
>The result of 500 hours of work in After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere goes by in 3 minutes, 44 seconds. I hope you find each one of them entertaining.
>This storyboard-in-motion took about 100 hours. Al signed off on this design on January 25th, 2014, only 3 weeks after he gave me his homemade "demo" for Word Crimes, which you can hear on the animatic soundtrack.
>If you watch very closely, you might notice a gag or two that didn't make it through to final animation or some very subtle changes in the lyrics.
When I first met with Al about this project, I was quick to point out that linguists would disagree with about a third of the "advice" he's giving out. His immediate reply was "WELL THEY'RE WRONG"--really loudly in the "Weird Al" character voice.
In my mind the joke is that the song's narrator is a know-it-all character that shouldn't be taken entirely seriously. But on the other hand, a lot of educators have contacted me to tell me they use the song as a learning tool.
DonHopkins on April 9, 2020 | prev | next [–]
Jarrett Heather is the artist behind Weird Al's "Word Crimes" video released in 2014 (at 48.4 million views now).
"Word Crimes" is Weird Al's spot-on parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" with T.I. and Pharrell Williams. I think Weird Al's version is better and more educational than the original -- smart and catchy like a modern Schoolhouse Rock.
Weird Al contacted Jarrett Heather after being impressed by "Shop Vac", his previous work with kinetic text (typographic animation), which he made using animation tools like AfterEffects.
This page on Jarrett Heather's web site tells the story and shows the art and technology behind the "Word Crimes" video. He's also published the Animatic storyboard-in-motion that took about 100 hours, to Weird Al's original home-made demo of the song! It's fascinating to compare them, and see how their ideas evolved from storyboard to final video.
>The Completed Music Video: In November 2013, "Weird Al" Yankovic asked me to direct an animated video for "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" about the supposed abuse of proper language.
>The result of 500 hours of work in After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere goes by in 3 minutes, 44 seconds. I hope you find each one of them entertaining.
>This storyboard-in-motion took about 100 hours. Al signed off on this design on January 25th, 2014, only 3 weeks after he gave me his homemade "demo" for Word Crimes, which you can hear on the animatic soundtrack.
>If you watch very closely, you might notice a gag or two that didn't make it through to final animation or some very subtle changes in the lyrics.
Jarrett originally designed the Live Journal logo back in 2000 or so, and parodied it in the video, with a broken pencil tip.
Here's a great "Local Boy Makes Good" article and TV interview about Jarrett Heather from around the time the video came out, that was previously posted to HN -- I love his down-to-earth advice:
Elk Grove animator thrives as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s partner in ‘Word Crimes’:
The acceptance of 'literally' to mean 'not literally' means English now has no simple, consistent way to say something is literally literal. At least linguistics nerds are happy though!
I don’t doubt you’re right, but that doesn’t make it logical.
I’m curious how common this sort of thing is in other languages—words or phrases taking on the opposite meaning of their literal definition. “I could care less” is an example of a phrase that’s commonly used in English. Perhaps it’s debatable whether that one has achieved acceptance or not.
Natural languages aren't logical. Pretending or wishing otherwise is a fool's errand, and I guarantee there are many words and phrases you use all the time without thinking that are entirely illogical, but still make sense.
> words or phrases taking on the opposite meaning of their literal definition
The word you're looking for is "auto-antonym". Very common.
> “I could care less” ... Perhaps it’s debatable whether that one has achieved acceptance or not.
It has; the variance between could/couldn't is mainly regional. And it's an example of how phrases or idioms have independent meaning outside of the individual words.[1] Another good example is something like the [North American] "How are you?" - it's a greeting, not (usually) a literal question about how someone is.
Prepositions combine with verbs to form phrasal verbs, and it's possible for phrasal verbs to have their own semantics that is removed from the base verb.
For instance, "get in" or "get up" are different verbs from "get".
It's also possible for a participial adjective (formed by "to be" + participle + preposition) to be an idiom.
An example of this is "to be heard of" which means to be known or recognized. This has distinct semantics of its own, not simply coming from the phrasal "to hear of". You can be heard of, or have heard of.
"to be comprised of" is the same kind of adjective, which happens not to be derived from a "to comprise of" verb.
It's not necessary for a "V of" verb to actually exist in order for "be V of" to exist, and to have semantics distinct from V.
First of all, he seems like a perfectly happy person, so I’m assuming saying he’s “sad” is attacking him personally because you don’t agree with him.. which is sad.
Second, comprised already means “consists of”. Unlike your example, heard, which is the past tense if hear. So “comprised of” essentially means “consists of of” which is nonsense. Hence why it’s better to say “comprises” rather than “comprised of”.
If we suppose that "comprised" means "consists of", it does not follow that "comprised of" means "consists of of".
(Setting aside, for a moment, that "comprised" does not mean "consists of").
Just like "make" possibly meaning "create" doesn't imply that "make up" can turn into "create up".
To comprise means for something to contain certain components (usually with a nuance that the list of components is complete). Since at least the 18th century, it has been used in a reverse way: components can comprise the whole. Charles Dickens used it in this reverse sense. It is from this reverse usage that the participial adjective arises: if components can comprise the whole, the whole is comprised of those components. Both the reverse usage and the adverb have been disputed, but are now hundreds of years old. The popularity of the participial adjective has wildly increased in the last half century.
There is a logical reason behind the the reversal of comprise that doesn't seem to get discussed.
Because comprise has a completeness nuance, it is actually a form of equivalence: if X comprises of parts A, B and C, it means it is equal to those parts. There is nothing else to X but A, B and C. Since equivalance commutes, comprise is expected to follow suit: A, B and C comprise X.
Comprise really means something like "exactly covers" or "corresponds to in an exhaustive whole/part relationship".
All that has happened is that we have lifted the restriction that the left operand of comprise must be the aggregate, and the right operand be the individual items.
> attacking him personally because you don’t agree with him
I was going to write "pseudo-intellectual twit on a lunatic correction rampage", but I went with "sad" to be nice.
If you look up the word “comprised” in multiple dictionaries they all define it including “consists of”, “composed of”, “made up of” etc. So right off the bat your argument is flawed. Perhaps you would like to define it the way you did, and perhaps some set of people you converse with may, but the point of a dictionary is so we can define words in ways we all agree on so we all understand each other.
As we have learned from Gödel, language is complete, but not consistent. Unlike math. So trying to argue about “comprise” using a more consistent logical framework of A, B, C, commutation, etc. is already a losing battle.
I could argue for a long time, having been both an English major, and a software engineer but the short of it is that words are tools.
Don’t use a hammer for a screw.
Sure you’re allowed to, and the language can evolve into everyone using a hammer on a screw, but the language losses something in the process.
There have always been, and always will be editors and people like the Wikipedia editor who help proscribe the usage of words to convey the correct and precise meaning to as many people as possible. The goal is to allow as many people as possible to have as precise an understanding of what is being communicated, with as much precision as is possible for something the must be complete but can’t be consistent. An example can be seen, even on this very page, of English learners, non-native speakers, thankful for what some call “pedantry”, so they can understand what is being said.
Without that, language can often become siloed, with the evolution of pidgins, and creoles etc, with the consequence that fewer and fewer people understand each other.
Imagine your grandmother trying to read and understand half of what is written on Twitter and TikTok.
For content that matters, and that includes Wikipedia, and published texts, editors who work for those publishers are the invisible people behind the scenes helping us all understand eachother.
You can scoff at “pseudo-intellectual twits”, but people often fail to realize that the world is often a better, richer place for intellectuals. The people who spend time on things most people find pedantic, often end up inventing things like transistors, understanding quantum physics, etc.
Software engineers often appreciate those types of results, but ignore or sweep away the results that lead to richer arts, language and cultural heritage.
I'm looking at Merriam-Webster; it doesn't corroborate your claim; it says that "comprise" is defined as "be made up of". Nothing about "comprised" meaning "made up of". Since Merriam-Webster's "comprise" means "be made up of", it follows that the past tense "comprised" means "was made up of".
> the language losses something in the process
Not all trends in usage are good and useful, and it's probably good to nip them in the bud. This one happened too long ago to fix now.
You cannot wish that single words be returned to 1750. If you want to return to the English of 1750, you have to want all of it, including giving back "sensitivity" and using "sensibility".
With comprise being used commutatively, what exactly have we lost? It is this:
Suppose that comprise is used with a pair of words, and you don't know what either of then mean. Out of any context, you hear " ...the froznitch comprises the gronfuzzle ...".
If comprise is unidirectional, always meaning "whole comprises parts", then you can infer that froznitch refers to some aggregate, and gronfuzzle denotes some set of parts (in spite of both words appearing to be singular).
What we have lost by comprise being commutative is the ability to make that inference.
That inference has little value, because if you have no idea what the words mean, it makes no difference whether you know which refers to the parts and which to the whole.
> with the evolution of pidgins, and creoles etc
"Drivel spoken by poor colored folk is destroying our language!"
> " ...the froznitch comprises the gronfuzzle ..."
> What we have lost by comprise being commutative is the ability to make that inference.
I think you’ve realized the value of trying to maintain precise meanings of words.
In fact, technically, we haven’t really lost the ability to make that inference, since that’s what the word means. That’s why its definition is “be made up of”. The froznitch is made up of gronfuzzle. Adding “of” to the end shouldn’t change anything. The usage of the word in reverse is the problem, and has been maintained as incorrect for hundreds of years. “Nine players comprise the team” is not grammatically correct. (Although as is noted, this has changed somewhat recently, and editors would argue not for the better)
So in fact this proves the point that editors making such changes are what help maintain the value of precise language.
I’ll just leave you with the following, since arguing definitions of words is always a losing battle, since language is too fluid.
It’s not wrong, nor “bad” to wish words change or be used in certain ways, especially when common usage of a word can cause confusion or be more ambiguous.
There’s always a place for editors, those seeking to make the written word more precise and clear, and even if you disagree with this one, or others, I would simply say that the assessment that editors are pointless, or “twits” is unfair and dismissive of their value.
> “Drivel spoken by poor colored folk is destroying our language!"
This statement comes across as virtue signaling. Pidgins, creoles etc are spoken by people of all skin colors and statuses. They are also amazing parts of cultural history.
But there’s a difference between speaking with your family, fellows, community etc, and publishing written text for mass consumption.
I don’t think anyone would argue that we’d be better off with encyclopedia’s being published in pidgin, leet speak etc etc.
That's what the word means (that's all it means) if the calendar reads 1750. If that's the English you want you should want all of it: no cherry picking of single word reverts.
> Adding “of” to the end shouldn’t change anything
Then feel free to pretend that one definition of comprise is "to be made" rather than "to be made of".
There is pretty much no aspect of this grammar issue that I didn't already completely understand forty years ago (at which time I sided with the prescriptivists, my excuse having been age twelve).
It's perfectly clear why some people don't like "comprised of", and what their reasoning is. That reasoning is seriously flawed, though, on multiple accounts.
The first is that language changes. This particular ship sailed so long ago, that it literally could only have sailed; the age of steam power had not yet dawned. In that time we have seen changes like sensitivity taking the place of sensibility.
Secondly, "be comprised of" follows sound word-forming processes inherent in the English language. It's obeying certain rules, just not ones that are above the sophistication of internet grammar cops. There is no rule that the participial adjective "be comprised of" has to relate to the verb "comprise" in a specific way.
For all intents and purposes, that doesn't really affect the wikipedia articles in any way, pointless to argue about it. Not going to read that wall of text about phrasing, but I assume there's a good enough reason (no strong opinion either way).
Also, wiki bulk edit tools exist, it's not like they're actually editing tens of thousands of articles manually. If you keep track of a bunch of pages, you'll spot a lot of such more or less fully automated cleaning/manual of style/formatting bots and tools that don't really change the content of the articles themselves (some consistency doesn't hurt I guess).
In the context of taxonomy, the term "comprise" is commonly used in research articles, while "constitute" is not appropriate to describe the relationship between phyla and classes. To convey the intended meaning that phyla exclusively contain the classes mentioned, the phrase "phyla are comprised of classes" is unambiguous. This formulation signifies that the phyla encompass and solely consist of the mentioned classes. Referring to the relationship as "a phylum comprises classes" simply denotes that these classes are included within the phylum. By adhering to these distinctions, the paragraph conveys a more technical and professional tone.
I’m not sure. I don’t write for a living so my reading of Elements was for personal interest. I think it has lots of good, practical advice but I’m not dogmatic about it in my own work.
Could somebody do the same for “nonplussed”? We have now given that poor poor word two opposite meanings. Currently, I have no idea what somebody means when they say they’re nonplussed.
I will say that word is always confusing, perhaps the #1 example.
Because with other classic examples, such as the verb "to table" meaning the opposite thing in the US and UK, you can at least always figure it out from context (if not from the accent, ha). And we know that "inflammable" is never used to mean fireproof.
But the two opposite meanings of "nonplussed", there's very often zero contextual indication as to which meaning is intended. And both meanings are used frequently, so it's in this total unresolved limbo state.
For me, it's the one word I won't use at all, precisely for this reason. There's simply no way to be properly understood.
Worse evolving opposite meanings is a real problem. Another example that became popular this century is 'entitled'. Now it means both 'being entitled to something' and 'wrongly thinking you're entitled to something'. So now a word we don't have a simple alternative for is less useful because it has become ambiguous. It also retroactively makes past uses ambiguous. This has a real cost to communication and the remedy is to enforce style to avoid it happening to other words.
"As one who subscribes to the anti-comprised-of doctrine described above, I can tell you it triggers the same "what an idiot" neurons in us as "could of" and "could care less". If I can spare any readers that discomfort without hurting anyone else, why wouldn't I?"
There are not enough eyeballs in the world. This dude can't even use colons and semi-colons correctly in his essay.
says "I think they apply that same art when they put together an album or a band" which is really not your decision to make! In no sense is composing music the same as composing a band; they're two utterly different meanings of the word. This argument is so flimsy that it seems like intentional BS.
“Languages change over time” is often deployed as an argument against pedantry. I believe pedantry is a useful force (akin to friction) and it plays a necessary role in the change of language over time. A language change has proven its worth if it can spread faster than pedantry can resist it.
Wikipedia often purges things with no rhyme or reason. See the vandalism of the Sony Exmor article because one of one editor deciding arbitrarily that it needed a good content cleansing:
I hope they start to kill lists in general. Like for example listing details of countries. Clearly those are not encyclopaedic and do not belong into Wikipedia by their standards...
I really see this as clear improvement. Comprised of is unnecessarily fuzzy word. It might be fine for native speakers who have fond memories of their grandmas using this word but for non-native speaker it is just obtuse.
The psychology of editors and moderators is fascinating. I see them as being cast from the same mold as bureaucrats. All of them, left to their own devices, will invent work and create obstacles.
It takes constant vigilance to avoid such people taking over a site and driving everyone away.
I also wonder what the correlation is between such people and being on the spectrum: The need for rules, the comfort and predictability of order and consistency and that ability to exercise control or power over something (this last one being applicable to pretty much everyone).
Yep. Definitely a case of one side half-heartedly participating and the other side playing for keeps.
At some point, the toxicity will generate a wakeup call among normal people and they will have to face facts that a really rotten contingent of loudmouth pushy sorts are squatting in the culture, acting as if they own it.
> The phrase is comprised of is increasingly common but has long been considered poor usage. It was not a frequent collocation until about 1950. Replace it with some other, more accurate phrase -- e.g. ...
> "Moreover, the crowd in the mysterious room was comprised of [read comprised or was comprised of] adults, and Harry knew there were not nearly that many teachers at Hogwarts" J.K Rowling ...
Mine is "try and" - Please, please stop saying this. It doesn't make any sense (except in the rare cases that it does, like "try and fail," unless you really are trying TO fail, in which case it doesn't)
The correct phrase is "try TO"
I'm on a one-person crusade to fix this throughout the English speaking world, by occasionally ranting about it to a relatively small group of indifferent people on the internet. Is it working?
I'm not native English speaker, but 90% of my communication happens in English. I've spoken it for more than 30 years but I don't think I've ever had a use for the word "comprised". I do however write the word "composed" a lot since I'm a programmer by profession. I also read a lot of books (in English) and I don't think I've come across it there either. I guess I approve.
If contain and consist and replace a new word and it is supposed to be an encyclopædia then maybe it is a legit move. It's like English professor ranting about use vs. utilise. Mixing words are bad attempts and precise wording is objectively better, tho I highly question if the machine effort replacing a ambiguous word is good enough to detect what it actually means in context.
Yes I've been changing "utilise" to "use" by hand in Wikipedia for many years. When I read "utilise" I hear Homer Simpson in a top hat trying to be posh.
Perhaps some people find monosyllabic words embarrassing. Another word sometimes misused instead of "use" is "leverage", and you'll often find "ubiquitous" in the same paragraph in engineering/marketing contexts. But "leverage" should not always be replaced with "use": sometimes "exploit" would be a better alternative. And "leverage" has a proper meaning in finance, of course.
I think, we should make an exception, if the same sentence also includes a reversal of "consists". Example: "The right of way is comprised of tracks, sleepers and ballast, while locomotive and wagons consist a train." (Rationale: We're clearly facing the utterance of an AI with suboptimal vectorization and there is simply nothing we can do about this.) ;-)
I'm not sure I agree with the pedantry, but I'll leave that to the side and ask:
Why change "comprised of" to "consists of" (for example) rather than changing it to "comprises"? If you are so hung up on the usage of that word, why not use it in the way you think is correct rather than trying to excise it from Wikipedia?
I might have to take up a new hobby against this user and undo their damage to wikipedia. We don't need these kinds of white knights patrolling the kingdom thinking they're doing something good when they're actually damaging the fabric and efforts of others.
Remember when the Comic Sans creator said, “If you love Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and you should get a new hobby. And if you hate Comic Sans you also don’t know much about typography and should get a new hobby.
Couldn't it be argued that it's totally okay to have two separate meanings for "to comprise" as a direct verb (A comprises B), and mean the opposite when used in indirect form (B is comprised of A)?
If we are going to crack down on style, there are far bigger fish needing a fry. I hate how common passive voice has become, but I'm not going on an edit crusade to eliminate needless uses.
How many people, I wonder, criticize this user's actions as pedantic, and yet themselves regularly make use of and appreciate code formatters like Black, Prettier, or yapf?
This essay and this crusade are a perfect embodiment of why no one takes Wikipedia seriously (even if we all use it as a starting place for research).
I cannot imagine dedicating 15+ years of my life over something that is grammatically incorrect in some contexts at its worst — but is frequently just a stylistic choice.
Of all the hills to die on and disrupt prose over, the author chooses this one. Wikipedia is full of poor writing and sentence construction, but this is worthy of 90,000 edits? Unbelievable.
Telling someone to “touch grass” is incredibly overdone and passé, but this person really needs to touch grass.
> So my actual process involves a program that does the Wikipedia search (it just fetches the same URL as you fetch when you type in the Wikipedia search box) and compares the list to the previously fetched lists. It selects only those articles that weren't in one of those lists in the previous six months and generates a web page linking to them, in alphabetical order. I browse that page and proceed to edit them in order. I edit about 60 articles a week this way, typically within a few days of the article being created or edited to require it.
> 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."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprised_of