Comment by tysam_and | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tysam_and | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I find this to be a false equivalence.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com