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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> It's not just that some people dislike it; it's simply wrong.

Language changes. Words frequently develop the opposite meaning of what they originally had—opposites seem to be semantically closer and more prone to switching than completely unrelated words. When a word changes meaning, it is not wrong to use it in the new way, and at some point it even becomes wrong to use it in the original way: if you used "terrific" to mean "inspiring terror", you would confuse most of your audience!

In this particular case what I find funny is that the author acknowledges that this semantic shift has been going on for hundreds of years and all that was holding it back was the language purists. According to their own account, when the purists fell out of favor in the 60s it was like a dam burst.

The "incorrect" usage recently overtook the correct one in published books:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o...

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Semantic shift is certainly a phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that it should always be embraced or is useful. There's a clear use for unambiguous and Technical language.

If you write a patent, statement of work, product specification, or contract with the wrong word out of ignorance, you only have yourself to blame

Semantic drift means it is no longer the wrong word.

What do you call the intermediate stage where half of people have one definition and other half have a different one?

In this case, history.

As my parent post points out, it is certainly not history in the legal system and other fields where precise and Technical meanings matter.

That only applies in cases of ambiguity at which point it’s often best to avoid both the old and new definitions.

I generally agree with that sentiment. And something like a patent the definition is well understood.

The sentiment that I disagree with is defending an incorrect or at least ambiguous word choice when there is a clear alternative. The strikes me as simple stubbornness.

That's the period where teachers tell millions of students that "can I" is wrong, you should say "may I".

The teachers lost that battle, like they'll lose all the similar battles to come, because they were trying to enforce communicating like old people.

I'm fine with people being careful in their usage in contexts where precision matters. I even agree that Wikipedia is probably one of those places.

It's the weird value judgements that people like the author assign to different usages that really bother me. Objectively, "is comprised of" is correct usage. It's the majority usage in books published today, and it's in all the dictionaries.

If TFA had left it at "it's ambiguous" I wouldn't blink, but they had to go off on a rant about how wrong the modern usage is, and that's a problem. It feels elitist and reactionary.

> Words frequently develop the opposite meaning of what they originally had

My favourite examples, because it also emphasizes some kind of ambiguity in the concept itself, are the english words "host", "hosting", "hospitality", "hostile", "hostage", with roots in the latin "hostis" (enemy), and the indo-european "ghosti" (guest, stranger).

I don't know if it's that simple, and in the case of "comprised of" I think there's good reason to attempt to make a correction. It's not that to comprise is some super common, popular verb that pops up naturally in our day-to-day language. It's relatively rare. My personal opinion is that people believe what they'd probably say normally ("x is made up of y", or "x contains ys" or whatever) sounds too simple in some contexts, so they reach for the the verb they heard some other people use that they presume is more correct and then use it incorrectly. People are conflict-averse and don't often correct their friends/colleagues/clients/whatever so it sticks around. So if the intent is to use a more correct word, surely people would want to know the actually correct way it's used?

And I'm all for "language evolves" - but there's always going to be a time when you correct people. If you have a kid who calls the ambulance the "ambliance" (common one for kids where I'm from) you don't just shrug and say "language evolves", you try to teach them the correct way to speak, spell and write.

I don't know where the line is - what should be corrected and what should be absorbed in to English - but I feel like "comprised of" should be corrected.

Well, that's not much of a value argument, just a statement of reality that entropy exists and everything becomes crap over time without maintenance.

Gardens also grow. But if you don't maintain your garden, they ahem literally become weeded, cough figuratively speaking.

You're welcome to tend your own garden, but until we figure out how to have fair elections I would invite all self-appointed language stewards to leave other people's plots alone.

Languages belong to their speakers, and the only way we have to vote at the moment is with our idiolect.

Languages are social. Other people can push back. You’re an adult. You can take it.

Wait until it drifts off further into "it is compromised of". (You can Google that, and you'll find it used in papers already.)

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