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).
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.