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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> () 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”
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.
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.
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?
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.)
"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 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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'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 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.
"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).
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..."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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'"?
One of my favorites is “nonplussed,” because its evolution into two opposite things is both generational and split across British vs North American English.
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?
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.
> > 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.
> 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.
> 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—.
> 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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
"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”.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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...
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.
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.
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...
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 :)
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.
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.) ;-)
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!
>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.
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?
“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.
732 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] thread> Wikipedia does not have a policy or guideline on whether "comprised of" is welcome in the encyclopedia.
This is nothing less but one person trying to punch way above their weight in shaping the English language.
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.
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.”
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.
This is especially important in an encylopaedia.
Eg the French have one, but that doesn't mean they have any moral authority.
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.
French is also spoken outside of France.
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.
At least that used to be the case. In Germany medical students are still required to learn (at least some) Latin.
- 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.
I like the idea about Académie, at least it defines a way to write new words. Some are picked up by people, and others are ignored, but that's ok too.
> [..] 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”?
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.
- fuck -> fuck
- duck -> fuck
Note: I do like ducks but they’re generally less common than fucks.
() 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.
> 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.
Should we accept "break" to mean deceleration, or as a noun for the equipment to slow down a vehicle, then?
Several words in English have multiple separate meanings.
> people say "break" when they mean "brake".
You were still able to understand what they meant.
Rather, instead of "should we accept", I'd ask "can people be expected to understand".
I'd think a divergence in language is more severe if it disrupts communication.
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".
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.
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.
Thing is, it's going to happen either way. The actual choices are being "the old man yelling at clouds" vs moving on.
I haven't read John McWhorter's "Words on the Move", but he addresses this question there, and this review has a summary:
https://byfaithweunderstand.com/2017/06/15/review-john-mcwho...
- Isolated cases of 'incorrect' usage can be considered 'incorrect'.
- Widespread usage that's different would be better described as a shift in language.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/trump-hurrican...
>Altering official government weather forecasts is against the law.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2074
>18 U.S. Code § 2074 - False weather reports
>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.
>(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 795; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(G), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)
Never heard of such, I understand why they get upset if someone sprinkle the sentences with ads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#Trademark
Get back to me when you can type the traditional ct ligature. ;D
Moralising about caring about style is itself prescriptivism.
Every time we avoid saying "comprised of," the pedants win.
> 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
And to support your stance against that, I offer this:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their...
They can take "cleave" from my cold, dead hands!
But in my language we only use the original positive meaning, so I was deeply confused by English using it for a long time.
> 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.
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).
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.
"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").
"My itinerary is comPOSED of four hotel stays."
or
"My itinerary coNSISTS of four hotel stays."
Much better.
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..."
"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).
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.
Did you read your own link? It explicitly calls out absolute neglect of the etymology as fallacious, as well.
At least I, as a non-native speaker, find the edited sentences always easier to read. They simply make the text better.
As the entire point od Wikipedia is to make knowledge accessible with co-writing, I find it just wild that people would object to better language.
So who exactly is imposing their preference on the world: the one making the text easier to read, or the one objecting to the edits?
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 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".
What seems like perfect English to you is not perfect to everyone.
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.
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.
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:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o...
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/
It was a 30 second runaway comment and the latter part clearly doesn't hold up against scrutiny.
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.
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.
What tiny fraction of one percent of the edits would you estimate you have actually read?
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.
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?
Is there some way to see what edits were made?
"As Polish speaker, I say leave out"?
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?
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.
First you dust the cake, then you dust the table.
The castle is impregnable.
And if you add more collocial words, wicked now is good, but also means bad. When a song is cool, you mean it's hot.
People tend to not object to that.
(Ross, Act 4, Scene 3, Macbeth)
"Inflammable" is taught to be avoided.
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.
Everything is objected to, that’s not sufficient for a decision. It’s the reason or volume of objecting.
Just saying there’s some objection is the Twitter fallacy. It could be one person, or even me, or it could be 100% of editors.
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.
the ministry of truth is easier to write as minitrue, yeah.
Auto-antonyms are actually quite common in English.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
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 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.”
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22comprised+of%22+site%3Any...
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."
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.
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.
>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.
"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 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 hand, if you're editing wikipedia and you expect your writing to not be subject to rando edits, you won't last long.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Maybe George Orwell copied the idea from Esperanto. For instance, "dark" in Esperanto is "notlight", and left is "notright".
Similarly for "notlight" implying including twilight, which "dark" does 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.
Well, there's also the Latin word "sinister" which has a very different meaning in English... Kinda seems like a common theme.
“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.
http://www.anmal.uma.es/Numero9/Forment.htm
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).
The most confoundingly powerful feature of language is ambiguity: on one hand, you can't take it literally; on the other hand, you don't have to.
A better source might be George Orwell's actual, explicit opinions on politics and the English language:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
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.
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.
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.
I could engage your other points, but why bother
> Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Language is indeed consciously shaped. Look at the history of Italian. It doesn't just happen, and Wikipedia definitely doesn't just happen.
And if you disagree with Orwell, fine, just don't trot him out in support of your points. Which was my original point.
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.
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.
That's what language is. That's how language works.
I love Orwell, but he was flat wrong in that essay. He was playing at being a linguist and showing his ignorance.
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.)
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.
The OED is a descriptive dictionary.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink
Compare this:
> common english is Newspeak
with this:
> War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength
The similarity is uncanny.
> A better source might be
... the actual book being discussed?
> https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Exactly which part of Orwell's opinion did you find relevant to this discussion and how does it relate to yours? This is missing from your comment.
> which is essentially what you and others argue for,
Please don't put words in my or anyone else's mouth to make your point. It's extremely disrespectful.
> The similarity is uncanny.
Is it extremely disrespectful to point out that your previous comment is defending the position that "to comprise is to compose"?
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?
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.
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.
Why people think they're entitled to their own ignorance is quite beyond me.
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.
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.
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.
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)
* 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.
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.
Another point: the era of a human doing rote language cleanup is nearly over; surely an LLM can do better?
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.
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.
https://patentfile.org/patent-writing-tip-comprises-vs-consi...
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:
https://mpep.uspto.gov/RDMS/MPEP/e8r9#/current/d0e200824.htm...
I did notice she singled out "comprising of" for abuse, which it definitely deserves. In a claim you write "comprising" or "comprised of."
https://web.archive.org/web/20150214014338/http://chronicle....
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).
No hate intended here. It’s just musing out loud.
If hate is what would get them to stop, they'd have quit before they began.
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.
Ultimately it's a small price to pay though.
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exmor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Exmor
(Original list) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elk_Salmon/List_of_Sony_E...
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.
Spot any mistakes? Do you understand what I mean in context anyway? So is it fine to use "breaks" when I mean "brakes"?
>"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.
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.
"draws" instead of "drawers", "brought" instead of "bought", "aircrafts", "softwares", and "could care less" can also DIAGF.
Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes (2014) (jarrettheather.com)
Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170420022942/https://jarretthe...
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Word Crimes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
>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.
Word Crimes Animatic:
https://vimeo.com/101810947
>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.
HN Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457
MrHeather on April 9, 2020 | parent | next [–]
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
"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.
Blurred Lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU
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.
Shop Vac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sOfO8Ei1g
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.
Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes: https://web.archive.org/web/20170420022942/https://jarretthe...
>The Completed Music Video: In November 2013, ...
Sure, you can add an elipsis if you want trim a quote, but altering words in a quote is equivalent to lying, even if a mild form of lying.
If you add "sic" you try to make the speaker sound like an idiot and that you have the right way.
Plus, "sic" pushes the attention of the reader toward this specific word, when it may be a waste of time of the reader.
The personal phobia for certain words (of the writer) shouldn't impact the reader.
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?
Brilliant way to make a decision in a community. I wish more discussions had room for such thought patterns.