One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake
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>Although it has been in use since the late 18th century, sense 3 is still attacked as wrong. Why it has been singled out is not clear, but until comparatively recent times it was found chiefly in scientific or technical writing rather than belles lettres. Our current evidence shows a slight shift in usage: sense 3 is somewhat more frequent in recent literary use than the earlier senses. You should be aware, however, that if you use sense 3 you may be subject to criticism for doing so, and you may want to choose a safer synonym such as compose or make up.
So it's not even an issue of grammar, it's just a meaning of "comprised" that some people reject. And it's a usage which is clear, widely used, and doesn't have logical issues (like "could care less"). Go figure.
There's some suggestion that it comes from Yiddish style dialect. "I should be so lucky!", for another example.
One says, "although I care very little, there is some wiggle room to care even less". The other says, "I care so little, I couldn't care less than I do now".
Either way, I care little is the main message.
However, "couldn't care less" is more sensible, because what is the point of expressing that you care little, but still have room to care less? That sort of expression would only serve as a retort against an accusation that you do not care. ("A: You don't care at all! B: That is not true, I could care less.") B admits that he or she cares little, but objects to being characterized as entirely uncaring.
We should choose the expression based on its logical sensibility, rather than regional dialect.
I don't know about "could care less" conveying the semantics - I genuinely paused when I first read it to work out which meaning it had.
Let's saying "caring" goes 0 to 10. "Could care less" includes everything from 1 to 10, assuming integer granularity - it's very much the right hand side of the scale, anyway.
Only "couldn't care less" covers that 0 rating.
So - perhaps it's terrible in conveying semantics and only context/tone imply the disinterest being communicated?
Fun can usually be substituted freely for a word like 'entertaining'. Is there something wrong with saying "That was so entertaining"?
"Entertaining" is an adjective and you can use "so" as a modifier to express how entertaining whatever you were doing or watching is or was.
This probably explains it better than I can:
I agree, there's definitely two conflicting usages here: and activity can be the noun "fun", in the same way that doing something can be can be "bliss" or "hell" or "a complete waste of everyone's time". And so while I can say "My drive in to work was hell", I can't say "My drive in to work was so hell" (because not an adjective). But if I can say "My drive in to work was enjoyable", and even "My drive in to work was so enjoyable", then what's wrong with saying "My drive in to work was so fun"?
So, instead of "so fun", some people would prefer that you write e.g. "so fun that I squealed with glee", or even just "it was incredibly fun".
At least that's the argument I've come across. To the extent I even think about such things, I couldn't really care less if people use "so" like this; the meaning seems perfectly clear.
Millions of people use this idiom completely intuitively, following their instincts of language that I, as someone who doesn't have English as their native language, can only be jealous of.
"I could care less" is either meant to be taken sarcastically, or it came to be because the "dn't c" consonant cluster is hard to pronounce, the same reason you don't pronounce the 'l' in could, the 'k' in knee, knight or knave, the 'p' in psychologist or pneumonia, or half the letters in Wednesday.
"To comprise" has the same grammatical usage as "to include" although the two words mean subtly different things. You'd never say "the care package is included of cookies and candy bars" and it's equally incorrect to say "the care package is comprised of cookies and candy bars."
If you want to imply that the care package has cookies and candy bars, but also may have other things, you say: "the care package includes cookies and candy bars." If you want to imply that the care package has just cookies and candy bars, you say: "the care package comprises cookies and candy bars."
It is an issue of semantics, and a rather arbitrarily prescriptivist one at that. Actually, I'm not even sure I would say it's a semantic issue. Most speakers will easily understand the intended meaning.
I do agree with what you said.
I keep seeing this construction a lot lately, but it always seems weird to me. Is it correct?
I am sure many here would argue that it doesn't adhere to their notion of correctness, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier
Even your implied "it is my opinion that" would still leave a dangling modifier (now the erroneous parse indicates that your opinion is a linguist, rather than the original erroneous parse suggesting that the usage is a linguist).
Dangling modifiers are an interesting issue because one often has to go all the way up to the pragmatics level in order to resolve the indended meaning (in this case, who or what could be a linguist?). Of course, speakers are usually quite good at that, so the ambiguity is usually only noticed in writing (and then people disagree about how significant the ambiguity is).
Even with some ambiguity, a dangling modifier is not necessarily ungrammatical.
Prescriptivists tend to have a much broader notion, however (e.g. the ongoing 'hopefully' controversy; apparently they consider it illogical when a speaker adverbially describes their feelings without doing so in an expressly grammatical context).
If you really want to be correct, it's best to just do what other prescriptivists seem to believe is right and not think about it too much.
Personally, I think making the sentence "grammatical" by expanding it (I am a linguist and my opinion is that...) seems rather unnatural.
Along the same lines, the redditism "(Profession) here. (Opinion)." could also be excoriated by prescriptivists for being ungrammatical on the grounds that it is a sentence fragment, yet it gets the point across and I have yet to see anyone complain about it.
In a very narrow and technical sense, yes, you could argue that the sentence is structurally unsound.
> so the only explicitly available subject for the modifier to refer to is "it".
Just because it is "possible" does not mean it is actually parsed that way.
>So the problem is where the subject "I" comes from when it's left unmentioned,
I do not see this as a problem. I think self-referential phrases (i.e., referring to the speaker), are usually clear, which I believe is the case here. There are much more ambiguous examples that may be nearly meaningless to the listener, but they usually involve two separate third parties that cannot be differentiated by the phrase in isolation.
In normal human conversation, it is generally easy for the listener to determine when the speaker or listener is being referred to, regardless of whether there is an explicit syntactic reference.
In short- yes, the sentence could be more explicit (maybe it does violate certain notions of Standard English/prescriptive grammar/style choice), but no, it is not unintelligible (it does not escape most listeners' mental grammar).
This is the sense in which a lot of people parse language. The whole point of correctly using language is that readers don't have to jump through hoops to understand what mistake you made and why you made it (i.e. what you actually meant), which ultimately makes communication easier.
>This is the sense in which a lot of people parse language.
I completely disagree. You are describing a sense in which they consciously analyze language. Mental grammars are much more plastic and forgiving than you seem to suggest. I do not know a single person who, when first reading such a sentence, would not be able to derive the intended meaning from it on the grounds that the modifier has no explicit referent, and I think suggesting otherwise is far-fetched.
Sometimes perhaps a genuinely ambiguous phrase may cause the reader to review and come up with an alternate meaning or two, but it is not as if their brain says "SYNTAX ERROR" and can't continue, bringing communication to a grinding halt.
>The whole point of correctly using language is that readers don't have to jump through hoops to understand what mistake you made and why you made it (i.e. what you actually meant), which ultimately makes communication easier.
I think you are suffering from an illusion that there exists an objectively and universally correct, monolithic, Standard English.
I also think that you are on the verge of a slippery slope argument by even suggesting that a speaker-referential dangling modifier caused readers to "jump through hoops" and hindered communication.
"I know what you meant" is probably the hardest thing for any prescriptivist to admit because it immediately destroys their very arbitrary arguments about "logic" and "efficiency" of language.
My point stands that there is a huge difference between a perceived poor style choice and a genuinely ungrammatical utterance. But human beings do not naturally speak ungrammatically. There are simply dialect-dependent variations in grammar, and the more prestigious dialect will almost always be touted as "the right one" by prescriptivists, who will then say that all other dialects are "ruining the language" and "making communication more difficult". By that line of thinking it's reprehensible that different languages even exist at all.
Sorry, but you are never going to get a universally agreed-upon and practiced standard. Yes, we need some rules to have a grammar and a language, but there is a huge range of how important those rules are for communication. Saying that any old "incorrect" use of language hinders communication is, to me, a bit like suggesting that people who jaywalk in a city are liable to gridlock its transportation system.
Maybe an analogy is sentences like "going to the store later, want to come?" (although the particular problem is slightly different). One interpretation is that English is becoming a pro-drop language in some contexts, but even many speakers who utter that sentence would agree that it's slightly syntactically unsound for omitting the pronouns (even though it didn't tend to harm understanding). (I'm not positive that this case is analogous to the dangling modifier case.)
Conveying meaning differs from conveying the intended meaning with clarity. When you have to say 'most people', we already have a problem. Reference material should refer. Leaving it up to intellectual interpretation is simply no good for material that is meant to record and preserve information.
That said, this possibly has nothing to do with the difference between 'comprised of' and 'composed of'.
Right. That's called a "house style", which is not about correct or incorrect but rather about having a more-or-less arbitrary standard all writers must adhere to in order to make the final product more consistent.
This is true. Sentences without correct grammar are unparseable(like "he jumped didn't far"). A lot of people seem to confuse semantic or logic issues with grammar issues.
I don't really understand the impulse people have to say, "Language is constantly in flux and there is no authority on what is correct usage. Thus, you should not try to change people's language and I am the authority telling you this."
If you're descriptivist, then one of the things that you should describe is people's bottom-up attempts to change language by, say, excising 47,000 uses of a phrase from a commonly read reference material.
I don't think descriptivists are obliged to treat a one-man crusade on a phrase with the same gloves as the grand-scale evolution of that phrase in the first place. 47,000 instances of "comprised of" across a zillion wikipedia articles written by a bunch of people is evidence of lingual evolution; one guy reverting those all to "comprised" isn't further evolution, that's just one guy changing something he doesn't like.
Someone first used the phrase "comprised of" in this sense, and that person, it would seem, got some traction. Giraffedata is trying to be the guy who gets traction on making the phrase ungrammatical. This does happen! At some point, we stopped for example using the second-person informal (thou). This didn't happen because the God of Zeitgeist changed the minds of millions of English-speakers all at once. It happened because individual people started to change how they used language, and it caught on.
Do I think that giraffedata's crusade is likely to be successful? Nope. But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing."
I think the offensive part comes from the implication that one way is right and one way is wrong.
... ad nauseum
If people start to use "up" to mean "down", that defeats the purpose of having words for them.
If a term's very existence is to provide a context-free way to disambiguate, it will be a pain when people expect you to infer the real meaning from context (cf literally).
In programming, if you accept some new idioms, but those make it hard to see if a given line of code mutates state, that will create pain for you down the line, even if it's "just the evolution of the language".
As long as they don't try to drop a "nuke-you-lar" bomb, I won't correct them. I could care less, but then I'd be apathetic to their linguistic failings.
(Edit: grammatical error)
It's the whole descriptive vs. prescriptive thing, and MW explicitly adopts a descriptive standard (they say so in their preface). A good introduction to this larger question is David Foster Wallace's (excellent) essay in review of Bryan Garner's (fantastic) usage guide (http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...).
If you are interested in usage, and are not familiar with Garner's book, I recommend it. (http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-Garner/d...) It is superior to MW for most writers' purposes. (For students of linguistics, MW might win out.)
Garner, incidentally, doesn't much like "comprised of" -- http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=2385 (“invariably inferior”).
For me, it really comes down to how you view the purpose of language. If the purpose is to convey meaning as accurately as possible, then these changes devalue the language since the usages that result from ignorant speakers are, by nature, less precise. The oft-cited "begging the question" has a very precise meaning that's difficult to convey in other terms. When ignorant usage widens the meaning, we lose the ability to easily refer to the more narrow meaning.
On the other hand, you can view language as a shared cultural identity that's always shifting and evolving organically. In that light, these minutiae are pointless because the majority of speakers don't understand the subtlety and never will. You can try to educate people, but you'll just end up alienating them. As humans, we're evolved to learn language from our environment and the people who talk to us, not from a textbook. So why would we consider the textbook version to be the canonical version?
These two viewpoints are diametrically opposed and yet are both reasonable and there are many well-educated people on both sides.
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/32/intensive-purposes/
Edit: this is a nice article about it http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/magazine/on-language-retur...
It's almost like a client-capability protocol upgrade in the tech world...if you can use the enhanced protocol, you can benefit from it. But if your client (the person you're speaking to) doesn't understand the subtlety of your word choice, it's pointless and potentially confusing to choose the more advanced usages. So I fall back to the common usages that tend to bother prescriptivists.
But since this forum seems to be the more capable, here's one departure that people might find interesting. "All intensive purposes" is a malaprop, a specific language error that's almost never considered to be correct. But they can be fascinating examples of how we make sense of the world. My mother was a child psychologist for 30 years and collected malaprops from the children she saw. Children, especially those who have not yet started to read, have very small vocabularies and learn words phonetically from those that speak to them. When they encounter words that they don't know, they try to make sense of them from the context in which they're used and the similar words that they've already learned. This is a surprisingly effective technique, but often results in some interesting mistakes that surface as malaprops. My favorite example was a child that thought that Alzheimer's disease was actually "old timer's" disease. From that one mistake, you can really see how children approach unfamiliarity in their world.
However, there are not many linguists—y'know, people who study language and how it works—on the prescriptivist side. There are a lot of well-educated people who reject evolution, too, although you'll note that not many of them are biologists.
I'm not sure that's accurate. Being a descriptivist doesn't stop you from wanting works that are important to you to adopt clear and consistent style; the mere fact of having a usage preference and seeking, within a collective work, to have that preference consistently applied is not equivalent to linguistic prescriptivism.
What's interesting to me is which items are in the set of things to be fussed over. Split infinitives, yes. Is-doubling, no. "Decimate", yes. Any other borrowing from Latin, no. It's so arbitrary, yet some people cling to it so fiercely.
You know, I used to make edits all the time. I stopped doing it because every single one was reverted. I'm willing to accept that maybe a few of the edits were possibly incorrect, but I know for sure most of them were correct. And yet the "owners" of the page are so uppity that they revert them anyway, so I gave up.
I gave up trying to edit Wikipedia and instead I contribute by giving them money every year.
Wikipedia is a unique resource, it is everyone's resource, we can't afford to lose it like this. Of course, given the scale of the project, some time has to be sunk in the unpleasant task of dealing with users who don't understand how the project works. It will be problematic if no one has the courage to do this any longer...
I used to run one of the main events (1000 participants and 200k Spectators) and was a co-opted member of the councill committe - The objecting wikapedian was some student from a european country who would have zero idea about what is notable in the UK
I agree that some people do revert too much too quickly.
Oh man, truly that is God's work. It's likely too late, but it would be nice to save "to comprise" as a distinctive word with its own shades of meaning and differing usage from "to be composed of". Should one become a perfect synonym for the other the English language will have suffered a loss.
"to be comprised of", on the other hand, is not distinct from "to be composed of".
This is like writing that the company "Apple" is distinct from "John Deer" because one name consists of one word and the other of two, in that it's both true and beside the point.
I don't think that fact had escaped anyone, and they are distinct for more reasons than one being a verb and the other being a verb phrase.
> "to be comprised of", on the other hand, is not distinct from "to be composed of".
The people choosing the former over the latter—to whom we are clearly deferring if we accept the spirit of your statement, which I take to be that one may be replaced with the other in a sentence with exactly no modification of meaning—seem to believe they are not quite the same. If I may venture a guess: they think the former is a smarter or more formal but otherwise perfectly identical version of the latter. Still, that is a difference not without significance, and one I trust you did not intend to dismiss.
Further, they differ in a way that the people committing the (if I may) error do not anticipate: to a good portion of those who understand how to use "to comprise" in the ordinary fashion, its use in this manner is a sign of poor writing, of the sort a well-intentioned but inexperienced high school student might produce. This is the exact opposite of what is intended in the typical case, I expect.
(Apologies in advance for any grammatical, word usage, or spelling mistakes I have undoubtably made, to preempt posts about that.)
It's a really useful and economical word, which is why I'd hate to see it fall (even farther) out of use owing to fears that it will confuse the "to be comprised of" crowd.
Age old argument of whether grammar is prescriptive or descriptive [1]. Anyone who has seen or read Shakespeare should be aware of how English has changed in the last few hundred years. Go back 1000 years and Old English would be utterly unintelligible to any modern English speaker.
Often I encounter people who get a bee in their bonnet about using nouns as verbs or people who are too persnickety about "less" and "fewer". Or the New York Times getting a bug up its posterior about "tweet" [2].
I find the effort some people, including the "comprised of" guy here, spend on this kind of thing somewhat bizarre and a little sad.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
[2]: http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/the-tweet-...
"The book is composed of many pages" "The book is comprised of many pages"
If one of these is incorrect, it can only be because of the meaning of the adjective phrase "comprised of". The actual structure of the sentence is fine.
In my opinion, I think either one is totally acceptable, as long as the meaning is clear.
Then we really would be back in the 16th century.
>Although “comprise” is used primarily to mean “to include,” it is also often stretched to mean “is made up of”—a meaning that some critics object to. The most cautious route is to avoid using “of” after any form of “comprise” and substitute “is composed of” in sentences like this: “Jimmy’s paper on Marxism was composed entirely of sentences copied off the Marx Brothers Home Page.”
>There’s a lot of disagreement about the proper use of “comprise,” but most authorities agree that the whole comprises the parts: “Our pets comprise one dog, two cats, and a turtle.” The whole comes first, then “comprise” followed by the parts. But there’s so much confusion surrounding the usage of this word that it may be better to avoid it altogether.
[1] http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules-and-tips/com...
"The traditional rule states that the whole comprises the parts and the parts compose the whole. In strict usage: The Union comprises 50 states. Fifty states compose (or make up) the Union. Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected."
I'm kind of like the view that people use language to communicate as they feel fit and then grammar guides should record how a language is used rather than try to dictate how.
Are you like the view, of the view or do you like the view?
He literally laughed his head off, and I could care less.
I think his efforts are generally good, in so far as the phrase 'comprised of' might be a good signal that a new wikipedia contributer is trying to aggrandize their contributions over and above their knowledge, but I think he is misguided in dictating how language aught to be used.
[1] made up word, perfectly understandable
I think your argument is a compelling one. The richness and color of our language (and, if I may, I'll make the distinction between the varying forms of English here - not all variations embrace the tinted varietals of words) is largely due to this organic growth and change of its usage. While personally I don't use "comprised of" (that I know of - my memory is imperfect), I don't know that I'd choose to battle over the usage of the phrasing. I recognize that some common phrases evolve out of this sort of natural mutation of language.
As English lacks punctuation modifiers for altering the context and intent of a written sentence, we accomplish that end through an expanded lexicon, wherein several is more than a few and less than a buttload, despite each word representing an unspecified quantity.
English is far more likely to invent a new word, filch one from another tongue, or reuse a previously disused English word with a new sense or different part of speech, than it is to recalibrate the ordering of synonyms on a continuum of intent.
"Comprise" and "compose" are inverse terms. Using one when you mean the other initially generates confusion, and subsequently destroys the language model around composition. The whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole. Passive voice is an inverting structure, so the whole is composed by the parts, and the parts are comprised by the whole. Include is a weaker form of comprise, without the implication of completeness (except in legal writing, where that implication is the default, and comprise is not generally used). But as the inverse of include is exclude, inclusion is more about membership in the set than about a level transition in the composition hierarchy. A league comprises teams, and a team comprises players. Yet a league does not comprise players; the league includes players. This is how we describe things precisely and concisely.
Oral use is much more forgiving of misuse, as it has error-correcting code in the form of context and intonation. Written use has a greater need for correctness, especially when such use is read by many, any of whom may repeat and propagate the error.
And I think parent post is incorrect. When you transpose or rotate the meaning of a word onto the meaning of an existing word, English is poorer for it. Once those meanings overlap, it is as difficult to separate them into different shades of meaning as it is to unlock gimbals. Also, "aught" is the shortened version of "naught", or zero, whereas "ought" is the synonym for "should" with a greater implication that the actor is obligated to perform, but not quite to the extent that he "must".
Logicity is perfectly cromulent, though someone should elucidate the conditionals for when it would be preferacious to logicality.
Also, take your example: "Language is comprised of rules that change over time." The correct alternative is shorter and simpler: "Language comprises rules that change over time." Most people don't even know that there are two perfectly good verbs "to compose" and "to comprise" that let you avoid the "is ... of" construction. If people see the clumsier construction in "good writing" they will never know that there is something better.
For example: "That house comprises 4 rooms" versus "That house comprises at least 4 rooms". The second statement should be "That house is composed of at least 4 rooms" because the room count is not an exact quantity.
At any rate, language changes. Both meanings of words, what is considered syntactically valid (see, 'because ADVERB'), and how phonemes are realized. Of course, that does not mean that one shouldn't point out errors (they're vs. their vs. there). However, sometimes errors become common usage.
In the case of misuses of "comprise" like yours, because everyone doesn't understand it: when the phrase "is comprised of" is used, its not clear if the meaning is "is composed of" or "includes", which indicates a potentially non-exhaustive listing of constituents, or "comprises", which indicates an exhaustive listing of constituents.
The preservation of clear, distinct, and precise uses improves the ability to communicate ideas. Truly, language usage evolves over time, but it evolves due to the aggregation of choices people make, and those choices can improve or hinder communication. It is good to make those choices with open eyes -- and to advocate for better choices and against worse ones.
Using overly precise wordage that not everybody understands is just as bad as not being precise enough. In fact, it might even be worse: if you detect some ambiguity, you can ask for clarification. If you don't know the difference in words, you can't even tell that you don't know and might interpret the sentence incorrectly.
I imagine this sentence made a lot of programmers and lawyers twitch.
> I imagine this sentence made a lot of programmers and lawyers twitch.
Patent lawyers especially. In a patent claim, the difference between comprising and consisting of can be crucial. [1]
For example, frozen chicken liver is spelled "fryst kycklinglever" while if you typed "frozen chicken lives" it would be "fryst kyckling lever". Sadly, splitting words incorrectly is the most common form of grammatical mistake in Swedish, so this result in enormous amount of sentences being hilariously incorrect. Most people will of course understand the intended message, as frozen chickens in boxes are unlikely to be alive.
Improper or nonstandard use of a word may reduce the precision in an alternative phrasing of equal conciseness.
This is the same reason why I carry on an utterly futile crusade against the use of the word "amazing" as a popular synonym for "doubleplusgood". We have synonyms to color the context and add subtle shades of meaning to our sentences. When they are employed inappropriately for an excessive duration, some opportunities for subtlety and artistry in language may be lost forever.
There was a time when "fine" was better than "good". But now one of the meanings is a level of quality that is merely passable or acceptable. Having ground "fine" as a descriptor of quality down to a dust of exceedingly small particle size, shall we also do the same to "amazing"?
"Mom, this pot roast is amazing--not as good as last night's tacos, but definitely amazing."
"You ungrateful brat! Leave this table and study, so that you might improve your pitiable grades from 'amazing' to passing."
That's one tear for all of them, not one for each. And it's a metaphorical tear, not an actual tear. If you really want to be accurate, it's more like a metaphorical grim and wistful expression, with a tantalizing moistening of the eyes, followed by uncharacteristically rapid blinking. It's very sad, yes, but it's not like those words are dead--they just have severe brain damage and will need arduous custodial care for a few more decades, until they can safely be allowed out on their own again.
Truth be told, I was actually thinking about my dear old deceased dog in that metaphor, because my eyes are actually rather dry otherwise. I use the same trick when I wear contacts. And I always get Memorial Day and Labor Day confused. One is at the start of summer, and the other is at the end. So I might have accidentally metaphorically shed an almost-tear for all of them on Labor Day. They will be missed. Because, by choice, I don't ever visit them at their assisted living facility. Or write them. Or write to them.
Myselfs` experience has been that even descriptivist`s have a braking point ,they`res always something that make`s them cry ,,, `stop !`, even when its' clear enough what is meaned !!!We`re is you`re point .I wonder!
Of coarse ,perchance the point is mute ,nobodies` going too pursuede the gy to stopp useing his toothcombs`,,,
The best way to enjoy Wikipedia is just to log out and read articles.
Language is a fluid thing, and the phrase "comprised of" seems perfectly natural to me (and probably most people). Once something like that happens it's usually on the way to becoming grammatically correct, regardless of what the current grammar rules state.
A preposition makes more sense there. Which preposition could be argued. In New Zealand folks say 'he is different to us' instead of 'he is different from us'. One could imagine 'he is different by us' or 'he is different beside us' as correct somewhere.
Hm. Is 'try to keep' using 'to' in a prepositional sense? That's a slippery word.
Stopping development isn't a blanket thing. Stopping vandals from painting on the train cars isn't 'stopping the development of rail travel'
It would be a shame if people from India could no longer understand people from Australia, even when they were both using English.
Consider the recent acceptance of the ironic usage of "literally" to mean "figuratively". If it wins, there will no longer be as precise a word that means only "literally", and the English language will have suffered a loss.
I am all for the evolution of language where it creates new words, adopts and embraces portmanteaus, or embraces the use of easily intuited non-words into the common parlance, but not every change is an improvement, and where a non-improvement exists, it should be resisted.
I consider that recent, especially given its long history of misuse.
This description always bugs me, because the description is inaccurate. The examples usually given are not ironic usages of "literally" to mean "figuratively", they are figurative usages of literally to mean "almost as if literally" (that is, figurative uses of "literally" to minimize the figurative character of some other figurative expression.)
It is also not recent, at all. Its been going on literally forever.
I wouldn't call that correct. Just "accepted". Accepting inconsistent grammar makes it more difficult to communicate, not less so.
We fix that one inconsistency at a time. This man is doing his part, despite all the naysayers.
I don't really give a shit about things like split infinitives but if you've ever seen a person struggle with speaking on a subject without the vocabulary to do so, you know how much it cripples them. Grammar is the same way. Why do descriptivists think it's ok to force everyone to invent language on the spot when people are in dire need?
Rather, they think languages cannot be prevented from changing.
There's no Platonic perfect language. Whatever the majority thinks is good language is good language.
Sometimes a minority with high social status is able to convince the plebes that their language is more correct too, but the plebes will still speak their language as they please whenever the elite minority aren't listening.
The result is that the written language is now separated from the spoken language and both evolved separately. (that's also why the vocal recognition in French does not work well but that's another story). So the alternative is much worse than just accepting that the language is changing.
Is it just me or do other people have this curious fascination with the manner in which reporters describe the obscure everyman subject? It's kind of a unique thing, when you think about it, boiling down an entire person to a few superficial data points. It shares something with minimalist Eastern art, you know, the sort that uses like two brush strokes to represent a lion. And yet these reporter "brush strokes" inevitably seem far less descriptive than the art, and far less expressive of the reporter's "artistic" intentions--it's like there's an algorithm somewhere that generates these descriptions (perhaps described in a handbook of reporter style?).
It implies encompassing or comprehending, not just being the sum of these parts. It places the whole above its constituents. Insisting on using it as a perfect but "smarter" synonym for "to be composed of" is poor writing and contributes to what may be the eventual loss of that word and, with it, our ability to succinctly express that notion, for no useful purpose.
The alleged mistake is exemplified in the article like this:
> The Wikipedia editorial community is comprised of many interesting people.
Supposedly, this should be "composed of" or "made up of".
However, that is incorrect. The verb "comprise" is simply being turned into a passive form according to an established pattern which generalizes over many, many English verbs:
subject verb+tense object
-->
object "to be"+tense verb+pp preposition subject
A eats B -> B is eaten by A
A includes B -> B is included by A
A included B -> B was included by A
A had included B -> B had been included by A
A makes up B -> B is made up of A (composed)
-> B is made up by A (invented, tidied)
To insist that we may not apply this pattern to "comprise" is a very bad case of prescriptivism. It's right up there with insisting that a diaeresis be used in writing words like cooperation, that sentences may not end with prepositions, or that infinitives may not be split.
Here is the real issue:
In modern English, "to comprise" has two meanings which are opposite! It means both "to constitute" (be a part of some whole: to make up) and "to contain" (be a whole, containing something else: to be made up of). The passive construction "to be comprised of" applies to only one of these meanings. It does not work with the "contain" meaning, regardless of what preposition is chosen. For instance:
This country comprises twenty states. (contains)
* Twenty states are comprised {of, by} this country.
Twenty states comprise this country. (constitute)
This country is comprised of twenty states.
"Interesting people comprise the majority of the Wikipedia editorial community."
"The majority of the Wikipedia editorial community is comprised of interesting people."
Note that, in modern usage, "to comprise" has two meanings: "to constitute" and "to be composed of". These meanings are opposite!
That is the reason for the contention. The "be comprised of" reversal only works for one of the meanings.
You claim that "B is made up of A" is a passive form of "A makes up B", the preposition being chosen to match the semantics. I think this is incorrect. The preposition used to introduce the agent in a passive construction is always "by"; "B is made up of A" is not the passive form of "A makes up B", but rather, the passive form of "__ makes up B of A" with agent omitted. Analogously, "The soup is made with love" is not the passive form of "Love makes the soup" but rather the passive form of "__ makes the soup with love".
(More examples: "Cereal is eaten with milk" is not the passive form of "Milk eats cereal", but rather, the passive form of "__ eats cereal with milk". "Tea is drunk at noon" corresponds to "__ drinks tea at noon", not "Noon drinks tea", and "Tea is drunk in the kitchen" corresponds to "__ drinks tea in the kitchen", not "The kitchen drinks tea". And, for examples using "of": "John was relieved of duty" is not the passive form of "Duty relieved John", but rather the passive form of "__ relieved John of duty", and "Lance was stripped of his medals" is not the passive form of "His medals stripped Lance", but rather the passive form of "__ stripped Lance of his medals". "The dreidel was made out of clay" is not the passive form of "Clay made the dreidel", but rather the passive form of "__ made the dreidel out of clay", just as "The dreidel was made out of clay by me" is the passive form of "I made the dreidel out of clay". Etc., etc.)
I would say this scuttles your claim that what is going on here is simply an active to passive voice switch, even though I think I am of a different mindset than dragonwriter as to the acceptability of the construction of interest (I'm perfectly fine with all the ways people find themselves naturally using "comprise", as I am in general a staunch descriptivist. I just happen to also think you've mis-described the syntax of the English passive voice construction.).
It'll be interesting to see if their edits start attracting reverts and discussion.
Perhaps someone with skills could do before and after charts of edits that stick and exits that got reverted?
If you don't want to seem like an idiot, then don't write like an idiot just because recent descriptivist dictionaries were pleased to take note of the increasingly widespread misuse. You will be judged and you won't always have time to explain your principled write-like-an-idiot stance.
Unless you couldn't care less how you come off, because you already care the minimum possible amount.
Read the article, tools everywhere!
"He begins by running a software program that he wrote himself"... "he used Google to find the 15,000 or so instances of the phrase"
Surely in the very, very beginning he was doing it "manually" but it seems he's built his own tools, and is blurring the lines between bot/human.
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
It does not allow diversity of thought or opinion - here, it doesn't even allow natural evolution of language over time - if a "wikignome" has decided something is canonical for Wikipedia, then it is. No argument.
No matter how many people believe this is now acceptable usage, one person - typically one white man - has the right to sanction every single one of them.
We are supposed to tell wikignomes that their work is valued (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiGnome). But I don't think this work should be valued.
If "comprised of" is something that copy editors agree on and the rest of us just don't know about then it seems pretty reasonable. Language evolving is a good thing, but keeping non-fiction writing on the conservative side makes sense.
However, there is no good place to store controversy around the meta-structure of wikipedia: the grammar and phrases we use. Perhaps what we are missing is an article discussing the use of "comprised of".
There is an argument, both illustrated in the article and some comments here - and both those who argue for pedantry and laisez-faire have valid points.
Edit: and some Wikipedians really do like talking about this stuff. Look at hyphen, minus, en-dash, and em-dash for an example of discussions spread out over several article talk pages, several meta spaces, with some Arbcom action. There are easily 500,000 words just on different dashes.
Yes, OK. Grammar trolling the whole of wikipedia does not add information - it just serves one person's opinion.