[HN Gopher] Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of "comprised of"
___________________________________________________________________
Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of "comprised of"
Author : shaklee3
Score : 354 points
Date : 2023-05-06 04:57 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| melagonster wrote:
| In the context of taxonomy, the term "comprise" is commonly used
| in research articles, while "constitute" is not appropriate to
| describe the relationship between phyla and classes. To convey
| the intended meaning that phyla exclusively contain the classes
| mentioned, the phrase "phyla are comprised of classes" is
| unambiguous. This formulation signifies that the phyla encompass
| and solely consist of the mentioned classes. Referring to the
| relationship as "a phylum comprises classes" simply denotes that
| these classes are included within the phylum. By adhering to
| these distinctions, the paragraph conveys a more technical and
| professional tone.
| ludston wrote:
| I enjoy collecting little things like this to annoy the grammar
| gatekeepers. Why say "regardless" when "irregardless" means the
| same thing but also annoys prescriptivists? "Ironical" instead of
| "ironic" and "less" instead of "fewer".
|
| Now that I know, "comprised of" fits in this category, it's
| definitely going to be a part of the everyday lexicon.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| The use of prescriptivists as though it was a sports team is
| ironic. It's actually _you_ who 's pushing a certain use of
| language despite knowing that it's ambiguous. _You 're_ the one
| enforcing your language on others.
| kevinh wrote:
| Communication through language seems like it's by its very
| nature enforcing your language on others.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Ban nghi tot hon neu chung ta giao tiep bang nghia moi
| nguoi khong the hieu ko?
| a2800276 wrote:
| ... and being antisocial. What's the point of doing things
| with the sole motivation of annoying people?
| ludston wrote:
| Firstly because it makes me laugh, but also it's because
| it's actually gatekeeping other people's language that is
| excluding and antisocial. I firmly believe that we ought to
| accept the language that others use when the speakers
| intention is clear, even if they "don't speak good". The
| uneducated don't deserve scorn by default just because
| nobody rapped them across the knuckles when they used "coz"
| instead of "because". And that's ignoring even that many of
| these grammatically incorrect but often used phrases come
| from minority groups and shitting on people for using them
| is actually a subtle avenue for (probably unintended)
| racism.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Except for if someone hasn't been educated what
| 'ironical' means, in which case you'd like to dunk on
| them.
| ludston wrote:
| If somebody doesn't know what ironical means they are
| either a child, ESL or one of the lucky 10000 and
| therefore don't deserve any disdain?
| pornel wrote:
| This literally begs the question.
| charles_f wrote:
| You are pure entropy!
| ajkjk wrote:
| > Less confusing in musical context
|
| says "I think they apply that same art when they put together an
| album or a band" which is really not your decision to make! In no
| sense is composing music the same as composing a band; they're
| two utterly different meanings of the word. This argument is so
| flimsy that it seems like intentional BS.
| maperz wrote:
| ,,Many writers use this phrase to aggrandize a sentence -- to
| intentionally make it longer and more sophisticated"
|
| This has to be the perfect example for the usage of the word
| aggrandize itself.
| hatsune wrote:
| If contain and consist and replace a new word and it is supposed
| to be an encyclopaedia 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.
| infostud wrote:
| 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.
| bloak wrote:
| 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.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Maybe I'm in the minority, but I actually prefer the use "is
| comprised of" over "comprises". For the supposedly correct
| version, you can almost always say it differently:
|
| E.g. simply: A proton contains three quarks. But if you want to
| use passive voice, there is no good other option. A proton is
| made of three quarks? Sounds too colloquial. ...is put together
| from...? No. I think "A proton is comprised of three quarks" is
| the cleanest way of saying what I want to say.
|
| And yes, this was an actual example from my work and I discussed
| it through because I feel strongly about it :-)
| dheera wrote:
| I believe technically speaking, "is composed of" is correct,
| "is comprised of" is not. Although "is comprised of" sounds
| more elite.
| joe__f wrote:
| I usually see 'a proton is made up of three quarks'
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yes, for whatever reason "is comprised of" feels like a
| natural, abeit rather technical/formal, expression. It reads
| clearly, something I'd expect to see in technical documentation
| or an encyclopedia article or non-fiction book.
|
| Whereas "comprises" feels halfway archaic when I read it, like
| it's the way an elderly British academic might speak, or
| something only used in legalese. Somebody using "comprises" in
| writing strikes me as a little odd, a little bit pretentious.
|
| I'm not saying whether any of this is right/wrong, it's just
| the connotations I've absorbed.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I would object to the sentence "A proton is comprised of three
| quarks" on scientific grounds rather than grammatical ones.
| Only a tiny minority of the mass of the proton is in the three
| constituent quarks.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Has the fellow heard of something called find and replace? isn't
| there some way to do this in batch?
| ulizzle wrote:
| "As one who subscribes to the anti-comprised-of doctrine
| described above, I can tell you it triggers the same "what an
| idiot" neurons in us as "could of" and "could care less". If I
| can spare any readers that discomfort without hurting anyone
| else, why wouldn't I?"
|
| There are not enough eyeballs in the world. This dude can't even
| use colons and semi-colons correctly in his essay.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| This kind of tyrannical obsession over minutiae, the sheer
| spectacle and narcissism, leaves me feeling ill.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| I love these one-person crusades against present reality. Words
| mean whatever a critical mass of people want them to mean. For
| example, the usage of the present tense here:
|
| _" Composed of" and "consists of" are better alternatives._
|
| is incorrect. It should read:
|
| _Composed of " and "consists of"_ were _better alternatives._
|
| This thread is literally a clout ATM machine for a group
| comprised of pedants.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "ATM machine"? RAS syndrome.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| Lol out loud!
| dllthomas wrote:
| I literally lolled.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| > Words mean whatever a critical mass of people want them to
| mean.
|
| Yes this is true for natural language, but we don't want
| Wikipedia to have natural language. We want Wikipedia to have
| clear and concise language.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| There's no governing body that decides how the English
| language is to be used. It's defined by the people as they
| write, speak and interpret it.
|
| French for example, is different. They have council with
| official authority over the language.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
| SilasX wrote:
| Whether a language has a governing body is irrelevant to
| whether you should attempt to use clear, easily-understood
| language. The concerns apply equally in French and English.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Sure i meant to point out that there's not necessarily a
| difference between natural and clear, concise language.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think the author is talking about a general scenario, not one
| of their past edits.
| jzb wrote:
| Allow me to quote you back to you. "It's also not really
| serverless to begin with, because at the end of the day code is
| being executed on a physical device that many of us might call
| a "server" [1]
|
| A _critical mass_ of people have adopted the term serverless.
| Therefore, the term means whatever they want it to mean, right?
| No sense in swimming against the tide here, correct?
|
| Yes, words mean what people want them to mean _if_ we 're
| willing to shrug our shoulders and accept the new usage or
| terminology. That doesn't mean it's never correct to fight
| against sloppy or non-standard usage in the hopes that it _won
| 't_ be considered standard.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811741&p=2#35812073
| havermeyer wrote:
| I wish I could find the article I read a while ago on the
| history, but it reminds me of how "nauseous" ended up
| becoming synonymous with "nauseated."
| [deleted]
| SilasX wrote:
| Semi-related, it always bothered me that we use the term
| "wireless" for something that still has wires (just not
| between the endpoints). Though I don't object, or have a
| better alternative, and I get the logic of calling it
| wireless.
| kolinko wrote:
| "Radio" would be a proper replacement for "wireless".
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Funnily enough older people in England still call the
| radio 'the wireless'!
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| And my grandad used to say exactly the same thing about
| wireless radios - 'why do they call it the wireless when
| it's full of wires!'
| [deleted]
| prerok wrote:
| The better alternative is cordless, no? At least some
| products do use that (e.g. cordless mouse). Of course,
| wireless is now so widely used it might not make sense to
| fight it :)
| 1lint wrote:
| I think in the case of "serverless" we still share a common
| understanding of what the term means, even if the term itself
| is misleading. This "comprised of" issue is different in that
| it can easily cause misunderstanding between archaic and
| modern users of the phrase, where meaning is inverted.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Just because he's a hypocrite doesn't mean he's wrong in this
| instance.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| That's great example! That post is an unserious riff as a
| response to another post that meant to assert the correctness
| an individual's personal definition of a term on what I found
| to be tenuous pedantic grounds.
| dixie_land wrote:
| I could agree more! Irregardless of what words actually mean we
| should just use whatever we want.
| mrexroad wrote:
| Inconceivable!
| gadders wrote:
| [flagged]
| robertoandred wrote:
| I'm enjoying the argument that the meaning of words in an
| encyclopedia should be subjective.
| starkparker wrote:
| > This thread is literally a clout ATM machine for a group
| comprised of pedants.
|
| That's most high-level Wikipedia editors in a nutshell.
| bloppe wrote:
| The problem here is the ambiguity. Someone who uses the
| original meaning of comprise will interpret a sentence in the
| opposite way of someone using the new. "America comprises many
| states and territories" -> "Many states and territories are
| comprised of America" have the same meaning with the original
| definition. With the new definition, you'd have to invert both
| sentences.
|
| This is called a Janus word because it can be it's own antonym.
| There are other Janus words, like "table" as in "to table a
| topic for discussion", which means opposite things in American
| vs British English. The author touches on the fact that that's
| a regional distinction, but there is no such regional
| distinction for comprise. Therefore it makes sense for a
| website like Wikipedia to pick a single form, and the original
| is still more widespread than the new.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Biweekly is not its own antonym but it means two completely
| different things (every other week and twice a week) which
| for me as rendered it useless since you cannot know which
| meaning is intended.
|
| The best way to deal with this issue is to have body that
| slows down language changes, then normalise them based on
| logic and history, something like the
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy.
| FR10 wrote:
| Yeah the RAE is super useful to end debates on what a word
| means, thats it. I see no issues with language not
| "evolving enough". Spanish written/talked a century ago is
| different than what it's spoken presently, even if the
| words mean the same.
| blipvert wrote:
| Quite
| lolinder wrote:
| > the original is still more widespread than the new.
|
| I'm not so sure. Google ngrams has the new usage recently
| taking over in published books[0], and those usually learn
| conservative in their usage.
|
| [0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprise
| d+o... (this works because ~no one uses comprise in the
| passive voice in the old meaning)
| smcl wrote:
| And use of the suggested (and more correct) alternative
| "composed of" is more common than both of them combined: ht
| tps://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o.
| ..
| karaterobot wrote:
| How do we decide whether someone is using a word incorrectly,
| or if we should update our present reality?
|
| Another question: are there places where accuracy and precision
| are more important than others? Would an encyclopedia be one of
| those places? I'll reveal my cards here: I believe so.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| I am happy that you brought up accuracy __and__ precision!
|
| Somewhat humorously I think a good chunk of the disagreements
| here come from people treating those concepts
| interchangeably. Attempts to apply mathematical reasoning to
| language and interpretation are doomed to fall into similar
| traps.
| Grustaf wrote:
| While you could certainly argue that "words mean what people
| think they mean", that is not a reason to use words in ways
| that are CURRENTLY considered wrong, especially not in a
| lexicon.
|
| If you want to change the meaning of a word, that's fine, and
| maybe in a few decades you will succeed, but until you get
| enough people on board you will only cause confusion.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| What is a "clout ATM machine"?
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| An ATM machine that dispenses clout.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| The present tense is fine in this case.
|
| The author means "composed of" and "consists of" are better
| phrases to use in general (i.e. according to style guides), not
| were better phrases exclusively for use on his Wikipedia
| project. We know this for sure because in the "Quotations"
| section the author says that he changes "comprised of" to
| "composed of" or "comprises" in quotations under certain
| circumstances. He is not wary of using "comprises".
|
| The author also indicates that this work is still ongoing and
| meant to be evergreen.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's a joke: those _were_ better alternatives
| but they 're equally valid now and it's time for the author
| to let the language change and move on.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Yeah, I see that now. Instead of italicizing the word
| "were" to place emphasis like you did, OP italicized most
| of the quote and not the word that needed emphasis. Ha.
|
| For this reason, I thought his "ATM clout" statement meant
| the opposite of what he meant.
| hoosieree wrote:
| Surely you mean AT Machine?
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| I'm a big fan of AT-ATs but I like AT-STs as well.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| If words don't matter, then ignore the edits. People tend to
| copy what they see. If they see it written with the original
| definition, maybe that's what the hivemind will adopt. I don't
| see a problem with that and I don't see the point in attacking
| people that care. I'm sure you have things in your life you
| care about.
| gnulinux wrote:
| No, the point is words do matter, and they mean what people
| think they mean. Not people from 100 years ago from a
| prestige university who wrote a dictionary. Languages are
| fluid, they change and when they do change the present
| reality _is_ the way the language is spoken.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Obviously there's no universal agreement on which phrase is
| correct. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having a discussion. I
| don't know how many people we're even talking about. I'm
| certain the group that uses "comprises" instead of
| "comprised of" is not entirely "people from 100 years ago
| from prestige university who wrote a dictionary."
|
| I understand languages change, which I think is an argument
| for the edits. If the language pivoted one way, pivoting
| back is just as valid a change as any other. "Comprised of"
| and similar phrasing doesn't come out of the ether. They
| build in popularity as they propagate through writing.
| There's a big snowball effect. I suspect going forward,
| you'll see "comprises" or "consists of" because people just
| copy what they see. Most don't have a strongly formed
| opinion about which phrase is better.
|
| Personally, I view writing as a craft or skill like any
| other. Writing is different than speech and always has
| been. There's a huge qualitative difference in text that
| has been edited and text that is streamed out of someone's
| head. The former is almost always clearer to understand.
| Consequently, if someone points out a grammatical issue to
| me I say "Oh, TIL, thanks for letting me know" and then I
| adapt and go on with my life. My bias is to the established
| norm, not arguing that I'm riding the wave of a linguistic
| revolution. If I have an open question on something, I'll
| consult an established resource, just like I would in any
| other field or craft.
|
| I think the problem is people get embarrassed when they're
| told they're using the language incorrectly. I get it. I've
| been there. It's true that English does not have a
| governing body like French, but I don't see that as a
| compelling justification for redefining terms or just
| arguing that nothing can ever be wrong.
| dionidium wrote:
| This thread is proof of the opposite, in fact. Since neither
| "composed of" nor "consists of" generate 300+ comment Hacker
| News threads, they are plainly better.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Well.... tell that to the AP style guide I guess.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| Surely their oversight will lead to a decision about which
| usage to sanction.
|
| You can submit your thoughts here!
|
| https://www.apstylebook.com/ask_the_editors#submit_tab
| dataflow wrote:
| What I don't quite understand is the resistance. It's a fact
| that some people (and I mean readers, not the editors) don't
| like, understand, and/or accept the new meaning of this word,
| whether we like it or not. Whereas _everyone_ should be
| agreeing that the alternatives are fine. So if you have an
| alternative everyone is fine with... it seems like a no-brainer
| to use it? When you have something that everyone is happy with,
| why insist on an alternative that some people hate?
| woooooo wrote:
| There are a billion of us speaking the language. It's a
| little presumptuous to tell a billion people what to do and
| there should probably be some amount of default resistance.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| There's 380 million native speaker of this language, but
| another billion non-native speakers. If this change helps
| that latter billion, should the former 380 million object?
|
| (On a personal note, as a non-native speaker of English
| I've always found the phrase "comprised of" confusing. I
| infer the "directionality" based on context but am unsure
| how to use it correctly myself.)
| dataflow wrote:
| Nobody is telling a billion people what to do though? We're
| just talking about what word to use in an article edited by
| a handful of people. The billion people can keep using
| whatever words they want.
| amelius wrote:
| The billion people prefer to read the language that they
| also use, in all its glory.
|
| What you're defending is a bit like replacing all female
| TV hosts by men and then saying that nobody surely is
| against men on TV.
| dataflow wrote:
| Do you really believe the loss society would suffer from
| editing "comprised of" in Wikipedia articles is actually
| comparable to what it would suffer if they discriminated
| against half the population on TV?
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| I can only speak for myself, but the actual phrase
| "comprised of" is the _least_ interesting thing to
| discuss when it comes to this topic.
|
| I am fascinated by a single person taking up the cause of
| "correcting" the language of others based off of their
| personal linguistic aesthetic preference.
|
| I don't see many people saying "I often have to stop at
| the words 'comprised of' and reevaluate the meaning of
| the sentence that I'm reading lest I completely
| misunderstand it." This isn't actually in practical
| service of clarity, it's an exercise in preserving a
| sense of meaningful posterity -- a deeply personal and
| sentimental endeavor despite what "reasons" one is able
| to elucidate.
| dataflow wrote:
| But again, this isn't even about correcting others'
| language. People are fine to use whatever language that
| serves them personally well in their lives - but this
| isn't about that. It's about writing encyclopedia
| articles in a way that's best for their readers. Every
| comment I'm reading here so far seems to insist this is
| somehow personal toward the author and correcting them,
| whereas it really isn't.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| > It's about writing encyclopedia articles in a way
| that's best for their readers.
|
| This sentence contains a load-bearing "best". The
| Wikipedia editor's contention is that they have
| established the canonical "best", and it is that
| contention that is being scrutinized.
| dataflow wrote:
| "Best for readers" is not particularly subjective here.
| We're talking about an encyclopedia whose audience is the
| entire English-speaking population. Its #1 job is to
| communicate relevant information on each topic clearly
| and accurately to the broadest audience in each language
| - not to match anyone's preferred terminology, write
| Shakespearean prose, or push the boundaries of the
| language. We already have multiple words that are
| perfectly well-suited for use with the intended meaning -
| we don't even have that luxury with so many other words.
| Deliberately picking a word that confuses some readers
| and annoys others just introduces problems and friction
| where there don't need to be any.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| > "Best for readers" is not particularly subjective here.
|
| This is correct. It is exactly the same amount of
| subjective as the word "best" normally holds. Since there
| has never been a reproducible measure of best-ness in any
| objective sense of anything linguistic, it's squarely in
| the territory of subjectivity.
|
| If by "best" you mean "understandable to virtually all
| readers" then "comprised of" and "composed of" are
| equally "best"
|
| If best-ness is measured by something _other_ than
| usefulness, then the person that decides the new set of
| weights with which to weigh best-ness is performing a
| personal and subjective act. "Orthodoxy to a standard of
| English as cited by me in context of the year x" does not
| automatically qualify something for extra best-ness
| points.
|
| I will gladly entertain the issue of "comprised of"
| somehow lacking in accuracy with a person that is
| genuinely confused by its inclusion in a sentence.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Wouldn't this argument cut both ways? Presumably the people
| that started using the phrase incorrectly were bucking the
| trend.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I dislike the way you communicate. It's wrong. I don't care
| if a majority of people agree with you. That doesn't matter.
|
| Can't see why anyone would be annoyed.
| dataflow wrote:
| Why take this personally? This is not a personal battle.
| It's isn't about disliking the way a person communicates,
| nor about it being right or wrong. It's about the way
| Wikipedia articles communicate, namely, in a way that
| hopefully minimizes friction for their readers (whom it's
| there for - it's not there for the editors), without
| compromising on accuracy. I would think editors really
| ought to be able to distinguish "I like this word more" and
| "I think this word is best for readers".
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You asked why there is resistance. I summarized a portion
| of their argument, in blunt terms, as that makes it clear
| why some people might be upset.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| It's disrespectful to change another authors words for no good
| reason.
|
| Just like those people who always have to rename a variable or
| reorder some conditional expression when reviewing a pull
| request.
|
| If there is no strong argument for the change, just leave it as
| the author intended it.
| newmanah223 wrote:
| I use a chrome addon to ban all Wikipedia results from search.
| ignite wrote:
| I have to admit: I have a few phrases like this, that I'd like to
| do this to! :-)
| bmitc wrote:
| Are there any profiles of Wikipedia editors? I have to admit that
| they seem like another breed to me. I don't even bother editing
| Wikipedia, not that I ever did in quantity, just as I saw things.
| Everytime I have, even to correct some clear error, it is usually
| immediately reversed or removed altogether (things as simple as
| correcting the title of something). They have very strange
| conventions and their own Wiki language in terms of how they
| speak in comments and edit articles.
| askin4it wrote:
| [flagged]
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I don't know the right solution to this problem, but I wish there
| were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society
| against activist superminorities. Pedants tilting at windmills
| shouldn't be able to alter the cultural landscape this easily. I
| am aware that their problem and my problem are privileged "first-
| world problems". The seeds of the open society carry the germ of
| this pathology, I guess.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Idk man, some good soul corrected a common language error on a
| site where many authors are not even native English speakers.
|
| I am happy there are people willing to do the work for free and
| that Wikipedia is now better. Hopefully he corrects more errors
| in the future so I am less likely to pick up incorrect language
| in the future when I read the articles. Sounds like the right
| solution you are looking for to me.
| dmix wrote:
| Society always has people who contribute to specific things way
| more than the general population. And not even just generally
| in specific niches but some people are just highly productive
| and highly motivated.
|
| I don't think there can be a system to balance this without
| harming the wider system simply because these people make up
| the bulk of the work being done, and enforcement systems
| usually cause much of the same sort of power centralization,
| but often worse.
|
| Of course not all of the work by these powerusers is useful but
| I can't imagine a system that only blocks the bad work without
| harming the highly productive 'good' people who are trying to
| be more representative of the public. Plus stereotypically
| making the rules/processes is the easy part, because people are
| motivated at the start to fix things, but after it's in place
| the actual hard work of enforcing it and doing it right is
| often neglected... or these same small groups of "powerusers"
| will also end up running the moderation and use it to
| explicitly control things even more.
|
| Although those risks/issues has rarely stopped people from
| trying in the past.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You know, I'll take a very minority POV: overall, Wikipedia
| does a pretty decent job of reporting the facts. I'll trust
| what they say about some non-controversial person or event much
| more than any other media outlet.
|
| Of course it's not perfectly unbiased, and anal super-pedants
| do make it intolerable to try to contribute. That said, they do
| at least make an effort to stick to the facts.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure that is a very minority POV.
|
| I'm not sure about "much more than any other media outlet"
| but for mainstream non-controversial topics it's probably
| pretty accurate. It may not be comprehensible for anyone who
| isn't already an expert, it's maybe pretty thin if the
| person/subject isn't part of the modern tech and hobbyist
| zeitgeist, but it's probably not a bad starting point
| especially if it has a lot of good cites.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in
| open society against activist superminorities. Pedants tilting
| at windmills shouldn't be able to alter the cultural landscape
| this easily. I am aware that their problem and my problem are
| privileged "first-world problems". The seeds of the open
| society carry the germ of this pathology, I guess.
|
| Maybe the pathology is this kind of conservativism. I find lack
| of change - due to knee-jerk resistance and corrupt vested
| interest - causes far more problems than anything.
|
| There is so much we could do - easy low-hanging fruit - where
| the only obstacle is (this kind of) conservativism.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| After your first sentence, I thought you were going to argue
| the opposite. This person's arguments seem to hold water.
| Aren't the people that argue with him and want to revert his
| edits a (very strange) activist superminority?
|
| Maybe we need a defense mechanism against bike-shedding, no
| matter what color bikeshed one prefers?
| jaggederest wrote:
| > This person's arguments seem to hold water.
|
| Not in the slightest. Categorically, he's using prescriptive
| arguments, which are bunk. Language evolves, people can use
| it however they want.
| ghaff wrote:
| Nonsense. Editors will edit based on whatever style guides
| they use and what's generally considered "proper" usage
| while respecting the author's stylistic choices as much as
| possible.
|
| With respect to this case, I'd have to see a given usage in
| context but I would probably generally leave it as is.
|
| If I'm editing you I'll try to avoid making a lot of
| changes that boil down to stylistic choice but I will
| absolutely change things I (and my references) consider
| wrong.
|
| ADDED: You can of course personally use language however
| you want. But others will judge you based on that.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Right, and they're free to do so, just don't try to
| justify it by saying it's "correct". I'm not saying we
| should write poorly, or deliberately sloppily, just _it
| 's at the author or editor's preference._
|
| I'd support this guy if he said "I hate 'comprised of'
| and so I am changing it where I can", but the idea that
| there's somehow a logical argument justifying it is
| silly. Appeal to authority is particularly silly in the
| context of linguistics.
|
| If you like MLA style, do that. I personally love a
| little extra diaeresis and the oxford comma, but I
| wouldn't make them the law.
| ghaff wrote:
| >and the oxford comma, but I wouldn't make them the law
|
| Oh, I would :-) But I do reluctantly conform to AP style
| in certain contexts.
|
| That said, there is a certain appeal to authority mindset
| if you're looking for mainstream non-fiction (and a lot
| of fiction as well) publication. Maybe "correct" isn't
| the right term but "accepted practice" or something along
| those lines which boils down to more or less the same
| thing.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I do reluctantly conform to AP style in certain
| contexts
|
| Why AP style - written specifically for journalists -
| instead of all the other styles such as APA, Chicago,
| etc. etc.?
| ghaff wrote:
| The contexts are blog posts and press releases often
| targeted at journalists, who will often copy-paste
| sections, so standard company stye is to write in a way
| that conforms to what they use so they don't need to fix
| it up.
|
| Otherwise, I/we use Chicago and Oxford comma.
| appletrotter wrote:
| Someone has already pointed out that this attitude can be
| described as a "prescriptivist" attitude.
|
| A prescriptivist will say that a term is "correct," a
| descriptivist will say a term is "commonly accepted."
|
| Personally, this is what I say to prescriptivists: if
| they want a language with legally defined rules - they
| should learn French.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The rules of French are not really legally defined;
| that's a common misconception. Yeah, there is a state-
| funded cultural organization in France called the
| Academie francaise that claims that regulating the
| language is part of its mandate, but its "decisions" have
| no legal effect whatsoever and are widely ignored, even
| by the government and education system.
| giardini wrote:
| "Comprised of" grates at my mind: the sooner that phrase
| and the authors using it are cast into Hell the better!
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/can-you-
| use-co...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The Wikipedia editor here is not allowing personal use,
| part of their proposal is to edit quotes too - to me it
| reads as if the person has problems with compulsion and
| doesn't want to stop themselves from "correcting people"
| (which is not correction so much as forcing that editor's
| own personal linguistic predilections on others).
|
| There methods comprise of robbing others autonomy.
| (Wording chosen purposefully!).
| kelnos wrote:
| This part of the editor's process bothered me, too.
| Overall I agree with his premise and have no problem with
| what he's doing. In fact, I think he is improving
| Wikipedia with his edits.
|
| But changing quotations seems like a step too far. I
| think his practice of changing a quotation to a
| paraphrasing (where it doesn't really matter if the
| article includes a quotation or not) is fine (if a little
| obsessive). But actually changing quotations feels wrong
| to me.
|
| I do agree with his assessment that including people's
| grammatical/spelling mistakes in a quotation detracts
| from what the person said, but I don't think the correct
| move is to change the quotation to something the person
| didn't actually say. At most, the "offending" part of the
| quotation should be removed and replaced with correct
| usage inside square brackets to indicate the
| changed/added part was not part of the original
| quotation. But overall I think he should just leave these
| instances alone.
|
| > _There methods comprise of robbing others autonomy.
| (Wording chosen purposefully!)._
|
| I think you are in a way proving the editor's point,
| though? Purposefully chosen or not (I did chuckle a
| little), that sentence is garbage, and if I were to read
| that in something without knowing or realizing it was a
| joke, I would take your words less seriously. I would
| think, if you can't even use language properly, and need
| to "inflate" your words, maybe your ideas are
| overinflated too.
|
| On a different note, I don't think we should care about
| people's "autonomy" when we're talking about a resource
| like Wikipedia. "Letting people write whatever and
| however they want" is not a positive trait in an
| encyclopedia.
| ghaff wrote:
| Fixing "it's" to "its" transparently in many cases is one
| thing. More significant changes to what someone
| presumably meant deserves a [SIC]. Something that's not
| wrong but isn't your stylistic preference? No way.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > More significant changes to what someone presumably
| meant deserves a [SIC].
|
| "[sic]", which is always lowercase, indicates something
| the current author views as (probably) erroneous or
| otherwise improper that is left unchanged in the quoted
| text, to emphasize that the author isn't endorsing the
| usage/construction so marked. It doesn't mark a change.
| ghaff wrote:
| I actually knew that :-) Busy day.
|
| But, yeah, the basic point is to not change a quote
| unless it's some trivial mistake. (But you can flag it so
| that it doesn't look like you're the one who may have
| screwed up.)
| efraim wrote:
| Why is it ok to be prescriptive with things like spelling
| of words but not grammar or the meaning of words? If people
| are using words in a way that doesn't make sense to the
| reader, such as changing the meaning of them to be the
| opposite like the word factoid, it's not the reader that is
| wrong by pointing out that the word has a different meaning
| than intended. I have no problem calling out such use as
| being wrong.
| kelnos wrote:
| OP discusses this; the language has _not_ really evolved.
| Certainly there are some dictionaries that acknowledge the
| newer confusing usage, but always as an alternate.
|
| Also consider the "why": does this phrase pop up more and
| more often due to misunderstandings and copy/paste? Or is
| it because people actually _want_ to change the meaning of
| the phrase and are doing it consciously? I don 't see any
| evidence of the latter.
|
| Language is important. It's the foundation of
| communication. I think it's noble to push against
| inadvertent usage changes that make the language more
| ambiguous.
|
| Put another way: sure, language evolves as people use it
| differently. But why is it any more valid to push the
| language toward using "comprised of" in this new way, than
| it is to push the language to avoid it?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but always as an alternate._
|
| This is not true at all. Merriam-Webster includes it as
| its second definition of three [1]. It is not presented
| as an "alternate" or as confusing or incorrect in any
| way. To the contrary, there is a usage note at the end
| emphasizing its validity -- how it is "now somewhat more
| common in general use".
|
| > _I think it 's noble to push against inadvertent usage
| changes that make the language more ambiguous._
|
| But there is nothing ambiguous whatsoever about "is
| comprised of". Its meaning is crystal clear.
|
| > _But why is it any more valid to push the language
| toward using "comprised of" in this new way_
|
| It's not, because they're not "pushing" anything. People
| are just communicating in the same constructions they've
| unconsciously absorbed, like they do with most of
| language. The only people "pushing" are people like this
| Wikipedia editor, who is trying to impose an exclusionary
| viewpoint that, for example, the editors of Merriam
| Webster disagree with.
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprise
| philwelch wrote:
| ur looking at this from the pov of a linguist...this guy is
| not a linguist, he is an editor...ppl can use language
| however they want but i dunno if anyone would write a wiki
| arty the way im writing this comment...even tho u can
| perfectly understand what im saying
| epgui wrote:
| Grammar and style guides are prescriptive in nature.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Which is why we should ignore them and write however we
| like.
|
| Note that I'm not saying we should write poorly, or
| deliberately sloppily, just _it 's at the author or
| editor's preference_.
| epgui wrote:
| You do you, but I think it's insane not to want to have
| more norms around the particular uses of language. We
| already barely understand each other (see any political
| conversation or pseudoscientific debate on the internet
| where words get thrown around in abandon, with an
| abundance of ambiguous constructions).
|
| The English/American are culturally less prescriptive
| around grammar, but other languages (such as French) are
| often much more prescriptive with it.
| pc86 wrote:
| Having majored in political science it's rare that
| political arguments are due to a lack of understanding.
| They're almost always due to just prioritizing things
| differently.
| epgui wrote:
| I think that's true only when both people have a certain
| degree of sophistication, but in the vast majority of
| cases involving laypeople, basic theory (including
| semantics / working definitions for basic concepts) and
| reading comprehension skills are probably limiting
| factors.
| mxkopy wrote:
| The solution is to call it what it is - mental illness - and
| treat it as such.
|
| Being a grammar nazi is one thing, but editing quotes to match
| a language that stopped evolving in the 1970s definitely
| oversteps the bound between quirky and actively harmful.
|
| I'd even argue, in the vein of a sibling comment, that willing
| to label the activist superminorities that run things as
| mentally ill is very important. They're usually
| obsessive/perfectionist and workaholics, yet we're supposed to
| commend them and follow in their lead.
| choppaface wrote:
| 1. Create a Wikipedia page explaining the confusion here
| (borrowing from author's essay). But also ratify the
| "incorrect" as "not considered harmful and is permissible on
| wikipedia"
|
| 2. Encourage the author to do something that effects more
| positive sentiment with their time, even if it's "wrong." It
| could be this behavior is compulsive and author has problems
| controlling it. At least try to steer that energy, and just do
| not engage in fighting it.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Fork it
| make3 wrote:
| one guy deciding to change 90k articles unilateraly is kind of
| insane indeed.
| tinideiznaimnou wrote:
| It's just data.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Wait until AIs start making changes. Human editors won't be
| able to keep up.
| tayo42 wrote:
| i find grammar obsession on the internet to be insane
| overall. you ever use the wrong their/there/theyre and have
| some guy reply with some unhinged comment. such odd behavior
| npteljes wrote:
| Grammar is many things packed in one. For one, it can
| signal a bunch of things, like maturity, superficiality,
| seriousness, intelligence. The lack of tolerance, like in
| you're example, is likely just someone who wants to vent,
| not a genuine concern for grammar.
|
| The other thing is that writing on the open internet means
| that potentially many people will read the writing. Good
| grammar is borne out of routine, but this only works if the
| people practice the right thing - if they practice the
| wrong thing, then next time they'll potentially do the
| wrong thing by habit. So really, good grammar depends on
| reading texts with good grammar. It's also how we pick up
| vocabulary. Putting these things together, I think people
| owe it to each other, and the collective humanity, that
| they produce quality writings on public places.
| epgui wrote:
| I don't know about the unhinged comments, but grammar is
| important and people who don't care are wrong not to care.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Thats just your opinion. if you understand me and i
| understand you then were good. my experience with grammar
| is that it just explains how we talk, like music theory.
| when your young and learning to speak, you just speak,
| your parent (probably) don't sit down with a white board
| and explain noun and complex verbs tenses at the age of
| four
| junon wrote:
| Grammar is a linguistic study and more than just "like, a
| general guideline."
|
| For example, "you're" and "your" are two very different
| words.
|
| Let people obsess. They're not hurting you.
| epgui wrote:
| There's also a well-known thing about English in that
| it's culturally much less prescriptive about grammar than
| other languages. The American-English philosophy around
| grammar doesn't necessarily transpose to other grammars
| around the world.
| OJFord wrote:
| American English is trying to do away with adverbs
| entirely! Sometimes I find myself shouting '-ly!' at the
| screen. (I just wanted to leave that comment here _real
| quick_.)
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| I understand you, but it's more difficult than if you
| wrote correctly (according to my arseholish
| prescriptivist rules, if you like, yes) - you're
| communicating less effectively by not subscribing to the
| standard rules; I misread you, take longer to understand
| your meaning, it takes patience and begins to frustrate.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Also spoken language is looser. You can't hear the
| difference between "there," "their," and "they're" but
| your brain fills in the appropriate meaning. When you see
| it written though, there is a slight mental stumble as
| you initially parse the word as written, then understand
| that it's wrong, and make the appropriate mental
| substitution.
| epgui wrote:
| Spoken language is also different in that, as you
| correctly point out, it is at times more limited in how
| much information it contains, but also, in other ways it
| can be much richer in information than the equivalent
| writing. Things like nonverbal or tonality can contain a
| lot of helpful or contextually-relevant information that
| cannot be found in writing.
|
| So writing and speaking, while having a lot of linguistic
| overlap, are just different beasts.
|
| (Ironically I think my grammar in this comment is not
| great, but FYI English is not my first language-- I'd
| appreciate a correction if appropriate)
| OJFord wrote:
| That's highly accent dependent /
|
| I think I pronounce all three differently (Southern RP-
| ish (as in not farmer) BrE) but 'their' and 'they're' are
| close /
|
| Rhotic AmE though clearly distinguishes those, and I can
| imagine them all sounding similar in that sort of accent
| /
| epgui wrote:
| Sorry, what things were good and when? Your young what?
| tayo42 wrote:
| If we were speaking out loud you could figure it out
| epgui wrote:
| And yet, we're not speaking out loud.
| umanwizard wrote:
| But you _did_ understand him. You're pretending you
| didn't because if that were true it'd reinforce your
| point, but it's not in fact true.
| epgui wrote:
| You can't possibly know whether or not I understood them.
|
| I _think_ I understood them, but I can never be sure,
| because in order to understand something with improper
| grammar, you usually need to "fill in the gaps" with the
| most reasonable assumptions possible, and those don't
| necessarily line up with your interlocutor's beliefs or
| intentions.
|
| Putting words in other people's mouths is often required
| to "lubricate communication along", but it should be done
| as minimally as possible if the goal is for people to
| understand each other.
|
| See Grice's cooperative principle:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
| umanwizard wrote:
| Absolutely nonsensical bullshit. Everyone reading this
| knows you perfectly understood "were" to mean "we're"
| here. Engaging in the fictional universe where you didn't
| is a waste of time.
| epgui wrote:
| It's not bullshit, it's what explains a large class of
| misunderstandings.
|
| What's bullshit is people who think they know what other
| people think.
| pc86 wrote:
| We're not speaking. You might as well be saying "if
| things were different, they'd be different."
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| It doesn't seem like it's that easy a task. I'd argue improving
| grammar and language in an encyclopedia isn't altering the
| cultural landscape, I don't think the usage of "comprised of"
| is a meaningful cultural artifact that requires embodying in an
| encyclopedias language style. I'd note the person also allows
| for people to revert the change without consequence if they
| feel passionate about the cultural landscape of "comprised of"
| usage vs generally accepted better alternatives.
|
| I actually kind of admire these folks that do stuff like this.
| These sorts of obsessions are interesting artifacts of the
| internet's cultural landscape.
| chris_wot wrote:
| You need to look at those who edit categories. Wikipedia no
| longer gives much credence to those who create, research and
| improve articles. It is now full of people poking around the
| edges.
|
| There is one editor, BrownHairedGirl, who tags articles with
| "bare links" (note she does not actually change those links
| very often), and gets into battles about categories that has
| driven off dozens of users (if not more). They are the most
| toxic editor on Wikipedia but have amassed a group of followers
| who are of the same ilk - people who do nothing but poke at
| minor parts of Wikipedia but contribute nothing of significance
| - and will remove anyone who gets on their bad side.
|
| Wikipedia is said to have hit "maintenance phase". That's
| ridiculous, there is a lot more to be writing about. Basically
| these people are killing the project. It's a complete tragedy.
|
| Edit: here's an example of the vicious and petty actions they
| make - they created a category "Abusive, mean, petty
| Wikipedians" for people who use a particular category that is
| never filled in on their user pages. This has been there since
| 2017. We have one user who calls themselves the "category
| police" who is currently arguing such a divisive and abusive
| labeling of editors is quite acceptable. The irony is strong in
| that one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abusive,_mean,_petty_...
| jmull wrote:
| > Pedants tilting at windmills shouldn't be able to alter the
| cultural landscape this easily
|
| The battle here pedant vs "comprised of". What's the cultural
| importance?
|
| Language drifts. The rate of that drift is of no particular
| importance and that seems to be all that's at stake here.
| loudandskittish wrote:
| I'm finding this entire comment section confusing and I
| genuinely want to understand what is so offensive about what
| this editor did. To me this does not look like a problem that
| requires a solution and I even appreciate the essay (I've
| always had a hard time understanding the usage of 'comprises').
|
| ...yet I'm seeing unironic comparisons to both 1984 and Nazi
| Germany, so ... what this person did is evil?
|
| Can someone please help me understand this?
| crazygringo wrote:
| The editor is imposing a controversial viewpoint on tens of
| thousands of Wikipedia articles that is not supported by
| authority or consensus. Merriam-Webster, for example,
| disagrees with the editor [1].
|
| It's not so different from if a Brit tried to change every
| instance of "color" to "colour", or an American changed every
| instance of "colour" to "color". It would be incredibly
| annoying, patronizing, and disrespectful.
|
| Wikipedia is not a place for people to wage their private
| grammatical language wars, and so people are responding in a
| negative way because the editor is trying to impose their
| viewpoint by sheer force rather than respecting contributors
| who choose to use Merriam-Webster's 2nd definition of the
| word.
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprise
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I don't think anyone thinks this person is _genuinely_ evil.
| I sense people are reacting against what they perceive as a
| busybody who has a disturbing compulsion to control something
| that isn't even an issue.
|
| Even though this person is a lone wolf, their actions feel
| disturbingly authoritarian. This level of compulsion and
| control is immensely off-putting to the average person.
| Anyone who puts this much effort into controlling information
| seems like someone worth confronting.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't see this as a problem.
|
| The editor here is arguably correct in that the usage he's
| changing is incorrect.
|
| You may find it pedantic (and I might agree), but that doesn't
| mean it's wrong. Does tilting at this particular windmill make
| Wikipedia worse? I would say it makes it better, even if in a
| very small way.
|
| Even if you don't care about the incorrect usage, I find his
| argument that some uses are there just to make the prose sound
| more "intelligent" -- at the expense of clarity and ease of
| reading -- to be valid enough. I would much rather read "The
| residents are former New Yorkers" instead of "The population is
| comprised of former New Yorkers". The latter is unnecessarily
| complex for a sentence like that.
|
| I'm sure someone can find a completely separate example of this
| sort of editing that actually is harmful. But the solution to
| that isn't "ban all edits of this sort".
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| The solution is to organize your own superminority to build a
| new regime.
| version_five wrote:
| The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
|
| The refrain of the left "what's the big deal, why do you care"
| is exactly the sort of lazy dismissal that makes people end up
| resting on their laurels and believing that "one small change"
| doesn't matter.
|
| We need to get better at pushing back at the first small sign
| of nonsense, and not let things get really bad before people
| start to care. Ironically, this wikipedia edit is pretty much
| the most benign current example of a minority controlling a
| narrative because nobody cares enough to push back. See all the
| insane modern language policing.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Editing for grammatical/stylistic clarity isn't an alteration
| of the 'cultural landscape.' By that standard nobody would be
| allowed to pick up litter.
| echelon wrote:
| > some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society
| against activist superminorities.
|
| I'll be using comprised of more frequently. I was already a
| satisfied user, but now I'll continue with glee.
|
| Language changes and evolves to serve the purpose of
| communication. It doesn't care about rules or usage.
| npteljes wrote:
| I think you mean that it cares about usage, not rules.
| bbor wrote:
| It is my firm belief that language is, at its core, comprised
| of usage and usage alone!
| matteoraso wrote:
| >I don't know the right solution to this problem, but I wish
| there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open
| society against activist superminorities.
|
| Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website
| their playground, though[0]. If you get rid of the
| superminority, the website literally couldn't function. The
| inner workings of Wikipedia are actually a fascinating rabbit
| hole to fall into, but the takeaway is that this behaviour
| seems to be ingrained into human nature. Basically, the
| majority consume, a minority produces, and a minority of the
| minority produces a lot. You can see this in any participatory
| system as well, not just Wikipedia.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_...
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority_
|
| We're talking about totally different minorities here.
|
| Yes, a tiny proportion of Wikipedia users create a vast
| portion of the content. But that doesn't mean their _views_
| are minority views.
|
| If those, say, 1% of users who are contributors, still map
| roughly to the same distribution of gender, race,
| nationality, political leanings, etc. as the group of all
| users, then there's no superminority issue. If they set
| policy according to their own discussion and voting, we
| wouldn't expect that to be substantially different from a
| larger group.
|
| The problem is with superminority _views_ -- if you asked 100
| randomly selected users of Wikipedia whether all instances of
| "is comprised of" should be replaced with "comprises",
| probably only a tiny minority would agree. _This_ is a
| superminority viewpoint, which is the whole reason why this
| story is generating so much discussion.
|
| A superminority _viewpoint_ imposing its beliefs is a
| problem. While a small group of editors that is merely
| _numerically_ a "superminority" is in no way a problem,
| unless they turn out to be substantially unrepresentative of
| the larger population in their views.
| cmonnow wrote:
| [dead]
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >a minority of the minority produces a lot
|
| They produce a whole lot of _edits_. They don 't actually
| contribute an especially large amount of content, which is
| the thing with real value.
|
| The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that
| contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles
| each.
| tinideiznaimnou wrote:
| It's a really neat division of labor. Subject matter
| experts provide the facts from a subject matter-focused
| viewpoint. Those are known to be rough around the edges, so
| editors make sure they fit together in a more or less
| cohesive picture of the world.
|
| As with most human efforts, the emergence of a political
| layer is inevitable. But overall they seem to be doing a
| pretty good job keeping their shit together. Even though I
| have no way of knowing whether the information on Wikipedia
| is correct as a whole, at least it presents as self-
| consistent.
| harles wrote:
| > The content is mostly written by subject matter experts
| that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few
| articles each.
|
| That sounds like the ideal scenario. Any evidence that it
| is or isn't this way? I would guess it's skewed more
| towards a handful of folks simply writing many articles
| about things they're moderately knowledgeable about.
| chris_va wrote:
| I actually ran a full character-level diff with move
| detection over the entire wikipedia edit history (few
| thousand machines) back in ~2008.
|
| The vast majority of content was created by a long tail
| of users, with a very small minority of users being the
| last to "touch" a particular piece of text (copy edits,
| moving things around, etc).
|
| Probably should have published that.
| Meekro wrote:
| I'm reminded of an old saying, "The world is run by those who
| show up."
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I prefer this one:
|
| "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed
| citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing
| that ever has." - Margaret Mead
| itronitron wrote:
| The small group doesn't have to be thoughtful (and they
| often aren't), they just need to be committed.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| The strong commitment and resolve within a small group
| inspires others to join.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Oddly enough, in Margaret Mead's case, that seems to mean
| lying to the world about Samoan promiscuity to
| rationalize her own adultery (implying that in the "state
| of nature", whatever that means, it's no big deal), thus
| contributing in her own way to the groundwork for the
| disaster that was the sexual revolution.
| clove wrote:
| I've never heard of this. Can you give me the TL;DR?
| consilient wrote:
| Coming of Age in Samoa is controversial but the claim
| that Mead was actively lying is pretty untenable.
|
| The main point of contention is that some of Mead's
| subjects, 40 years and a conversion to Christianity
| later, denied having had casual sex as young women and
| claimed that they were playing a practical joke on her.
|
| Whether they were telling the truth _then_ and if so to
| what extent they 're representative of Mead's other
| subjects is a thorny issue, to say the least.
| rvba wrote:
| The minority wants you to think that the website wouldnt work
| without them.
|
| Reality is that their rules are only for you. They dont judge
| their own edits with same standards. If edits were anonymized
| tons od admins would get banned.
| jtsuken wrote:
| > Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website
| their playground, though[0].
|
| It's more like the minority of the minority does a lot of
| spellchecking and editing, but it seems, much more plausibly,
| that a group much larger than a minority does the bulk of
| writing.
|
| Any discussion of Wikipidia on HN is incomplete without a
| reference to Aaron Swartz's analysis of how Wikipedia is
| written:
|
| "[He] concluded that the bulk of its content came from tens
| of thousands of occasional contributors, or "outsiders," each
| of whom made few other contributions to the site, while a
| core group of 500 to 1,000 regular editors tended to correct
| spelling and other formatting errors.He said: "The formatters
| aid the contributors, not the other way around." [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Wikipedia
| psychphysic wrote:
| Wikipedia is _entirely_ controlled by activist super
| minorities.
|
| Articles are often heavily censored or simply biased.
|
| Maybe the whole internet is?
|
| But I find myself relying on Wikipedia less and less. I think
| chat searches are probably the final nail in the coffin for me
| directly access it.
| hkt wrote:
| [citation needed]
| vivegi wrote:
| It is ironic that The New York Time Manual of Style and Usage [1]
| cited by the article as one of the authoritative sources often
| doesn't follow its own style guide. A Google search for
| "comprised of" in nytimes.com [2] gives around 4600+ results. A
| cursory glance at the first page of search results and the
| snippet text in the results all look fine.
|
| I guess, we could say, much ado about nothing.
|
| [1]: Siegal, Allan (1999). The New York Times Manual of Style and
| Usage. Three Rivers Press. p. 80.
|
| [2]: Google search query for site:nytimes.com containing
| "comprised of". URL:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22comprised+of%22+site%3Any...
| medler wrote:
| NYT notoriously makes a ton of errors in grammar and usage. The
| "NYTtypos" Twitter account is amusing reading if you're into
| that sort of thing. https://twitter.com/nyttypos
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with the pedantry, but I'll leave that to
| the side and ask:
|
| Why change "comprised of" to "consists of" (for example) rather
| than changing it to "comprises"? If you are so hung up on the
| usage of that word, why not use it in the way you think is
| correct rather than trying to excise it from Wikipedia?
| jl6 wrote:
| Wow, there's a lot of unjustified negativity in this thread. The
| whole encyclopedia (and a whole bunch of the wider world of
| computing) is built out of this kind of hyper-focused nerding
| over details.
|
| These changes don't make your day worse. He's not shoving it in
| our faces or claiming it's going to save the world. We don't know
| what's going on in this editor's life or what he "should" be
| doing with his time instead. Maybe simple routine work is his way
| of unwinding from the maddening pace and complexity of the rest
| of life. Good on him for feeling passionate about something and
| seeing it through.
|
| We should be grateful there are people willing to do this kind of
| mundane janitorial work.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| This isn't useful nerding over details. It's more like that
| annoying person who goes around GitHub making pull requests to
| big projects with just some pointless wording tweaks in the
| documentation so they can claim to have contributed to the
| project on their resume.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Since there isn't agreement on this actually _being_ janitorial
| work (in the sense that they are not simply enforcing the
| Wikipedia styleguide), this is not some completely innocent
| activity.
|
| No, this is in its essence very petty vandalism, an attempt to
| _force_ his notion of grammar on the entirely of Wikipedia
| despite knowing this is forbidden. That this forcing is the
| intended goal is clear from their own description of the
| editing process, where they admit to never permanently
| recording articles with authors who do object to the edits.
| Instead they just record objectors for six months and then try
| sniping in the edit again in the hope that the author is not
| there to protect it anymore.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| In "Reaction to the project" the author links to a "semi-
| vandalism" charge. You can read the discussion among
| Wikipedia editors there if you're interested (spoiler alert -
| most found it valuable and nobody thought it was vandalism).
| jmholla wrote:
| That's by their own account. Multiple times they mention
| they don't do the best of caring about our tracking
| negative comments. They do however do the opposite. It's
| important to remember this is written by them and is all
| from their perspective.
| [deleted]
| spcebar wrote:
| I wouldn't call this janitorial work. This seems to me to be
| less like someone cleaning a building than someone replacing
| every pencil in the building with a #2 pencil, because they
| believe that type of pencil is the correct type of pencil to
| use. They haven't made anything materially better, except by
| their own rigid definition of what the best pencil is--and
| maybe there are advantages of using a #2 pencil over a #3
| pencil, but if you brought that pencil to work, there's a
| chance you brought that pencil because you prefer writing with
| it, and you wouldn't want someone, despite their best
| intentions, replacing your pencil with a 'better' one. Almost
| no one is going to look at the graphite and not be able to
| recognize words because it's a #3 pencil and not a #2 pencil.
|
| In my opinion, this isn't what built Wikipedia, this is what
| made Wikipedia hostile to new contributors.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _He's not shoving it in our faces_
|
| But he is?
|
| When someone goes around "correcting" everyone's language and
| writes a manifesto about it, that sure is shoving to me. It's
| not working towards a consensus by trying to convince, it's
| unilaterally imposing, and creating work for others to undo if
| they disagree. If that's not shoving, I don't know what is.
| masswerk wrote:
| 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.) ;-)
| KineticLensman wrote:
| If you look after the molehills, the mountains will take care of
| themselves.
| justin66 wrote:
| I would love to know if this guy shares any DNA with the
| Wikipedia admin who created tens of thousands of breast-related
| pages:
|
| https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/boobs-tits-wikipedia-tit...
| kurthr wrote:
| I hope he never has to read a US patent where "comprised of" is
| almost a required usage not only in the spec, but in the claims!
| It's expected by the examiners and demanded by patent lawyers as
| a term of art as interpreted by an appellate court.
|
| The term "comprises" and/or "comprised of" has a specific usage
| in patents. Comprising means that at least all of the listed
| elements must exist, but other elements that are not mentioned in
| the claim may also be present. This in turn allows for dependent
| claims.
|
| The alternative term is "consists" and/or "consists of", which
| means that only the listed elements may be present. It is used
| almost exclusively when claiming chemical or molecular formulas.
| bombcar wrote:
| I dare say you could find some of those 90k changes are to
| patent wording on Wikipedia.
| kurthr wrote:
| It's weird I suppose, but in anything other than a very
| formal (legal, medical, scientific, education, marketing?!?)
| contexts I find correcting another fluent speaker's english
| to be (especially colloquialisms, grammar, and word choice)
| just wrong. You can add context to it, but not really
| correct.
|
| Unless they're a dear friend, and they knew what they meant
| to say better than you. A person is expressing their
| feeling/opinion/interpretation in their vernacular. Yes, it
| is probably stream of consciousness, but that is exactly what
| it is, and just changing one word or phrase doesn't help make
| it clear.
|
| I suppose wikipedia is edumacational so I guess I understand,
| but unless he's really reading all of the surrounding context
| of 90k pages (unlikely) then he certainly risks making
| embarrassing errors.
| plaguepilled wrote:
| >"Many people appreciate the work"
|
| This felt like an addition to ward of anticipated backlash. As if
| the author was aware their point might not be received
| favourably. Hmmm.
|
| I reject the argument that this term is bad because its origins
| are messy. Similarly a lot of the points put forward here seem
| like justifications for style rather than actual points (yes -
| even those ones about supposed clarity).
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Going a step further, this person should know that those are
| weasel words and are very much frowned upon. [citation needed]?
| zsz wrote:
| ..."irregardless," anyone? :-)
| graboidhunter wrote:
| It is interesting that the account hasn't been flagged as a
| "single purpose account." I had an account in the past. I made
| two edits before people who disagreed with my edits started
| screaming WP:SPA[0]. It really soured my interest in
| contributing.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Single-
| purpose_accou...
| starkparker wrote:
| Wikipedia rules and policies are wielded as weapons more than
| they're used for their intent, or even as they're written. This
| account hasn't been flagged because more people defend it than
| attack it.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| For all intents and purposes, that doesn't really affect the
| wikipedia articles in any way, pointless to argue about it. Not
| going to read that wall of text about phrasing, but I assume
| there's a good enough reason (no strong opinion either way).
|
| Also, wiki bulk edit tools exist, it's not like they're actually
| editing tens of thousands of articles manually. If you keep track
| of a bunch of pages, you'll spot a lot of such more or less fully
| automated cleaning/manual of style/formatting bots and tools that
| don't really change the content of the articles themselves (some
| consistency doesn't hurt I guess).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style
| stainablesteel wrote:
| the internet needs a kids table
|
| people over 35 shouldn't need to deal with petty shit like this
| [deleted]
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Now please do same for "factoid". The recent inversion of the
| definition of factoid is a much bigger problem. The term
| originates from medical science and means "a FALSE fact that is
| believed to be true after appearing in print". But some
| journalists miss understood it to mean "a small, but TRUE fact."
| Their new definition was false, but is now believed to be true
| after appearing in print.
|
| So, the modern definition of factoid is, itself, a factoid.
|
| Making this, er, fact well known will be useful to future
| historians, who, when they encounter the word in early 2nd
| millennium texts, are going to have to puzzle over whether or not
| the factoid mentioned is actually meant to be true, or false.
|
| Edit, btw, the suffix "oid" means "resembling", so, a factoid is
| something resembling a fact. Therefore, factoid contains its own
| definition; and we still butchered it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You're incorrect about the origin. According to Merriam-Webster
| [1]:
|
| > _We can thank Norman Mailer for factoid: he used the word in
| his 1973 book Marilyn (about Marilyn Monroe), and he is
| believed to be the coiner of the word._
|
| But who cares? A word totally invented just five short decades
| ago quickly morphed, as MW continues:
|
| > _The word has since evolved so that now it most often refers
| to things that decidedly are facts, just not ones that are
| significant._
|
| Why should Norman Mailer's made-up definition get precedence
| over the people who actually use it? Just because you coin
| something doesn't mean you own it. I don't think future
| historians are going to be confused. Never in my life have I
| encountered the word "factoid" used in Mailer's sense, until
| reading your comment. The new definition has long since taken
| over, long live fun little facts -- long live factoids!
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
| srcreigh wrote:
| "Fact" related words have always had a divergence. Latin factum
| verb means to do. Various words fall on the objective aspect of
| action (fact, factual) while others fall on the more subjective
| "artificial" aspect (factitious, factoid)
|
| The family of the word "act" has similar divergence from
| similar Latin word actus
| in_being_the wrote:
| A true fact is as capable of "resembling a fact" as a false
| one.
| b800h wrote:
| This reminds me of that Dutch guy who has managed to father more
| than 500 children by sperm donation. Unhealthy and obsessive.
|
| A very small part of me wants to create a bot which reverses
| those edits, and then changes his own articles to include the
| term.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| 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/.
| netsharc wrote:
| "I upgraded my breaks and my car slows down a lot better now.".
|
| Spot any mistakes? Do you understand what I mean in context
| anyway? So is it fine to use "breaks" when I mean "brakes"?
| yCombLinks wrote:
| 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!
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| 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.
| rossriley wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I really see this as clear improvement. Comprised of is
| unnecessarily fuzzy word. It might be fine for native speakers
| who have fond memories of their grandmas using this word but for
| non-native speaker it is just obtuse.
| qubex wrote:
| I'm impressed.
| shadowtree wrote:
| Mental health is a spectrum, it is good this specific persona
| found an outlet that causes zero harm to himself or others.
|
| Profile of him: https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-
| wikignome-1...
|
| Interesting comments around social on this specific persona - the
| literal grammar nazi.
| wdr1 wrote:
| The interesting thing about the English language is that once 50%
| of the popular starts to use a word or phrase incorrectly, they
| become correct.
| pelorat wrote:
| I'm not native English speaker, but 90% of my communication
| happens in English. I've spoken it for more than 30 years but I
| don't think I've ever had a use for the word "comprised". I do
| however write the word "composed" a lot since I'm a programmer by
| profession. I also read a lot of books (in English) and I don't
| think I've come across it there either. I guess I approve.
| alvah wrote:
| Not all heroes wear capes.
|
| "draws" instead of "drawers", "brought" instead of "bought",
| "aircrafts", "softwares", and "could care less" can also DIAGF.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Speaking of heroes who I could care less about:
|
| 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, "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.
|
| The Animatic: https://vimeo.com/102959171
|
| >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.
|
| Jarrett originally designed the Live Journal logo back in 2000
| or so, and parodied it in the video, with a broken pencil tip.
|
| https://jarrett.livejournal.com/208198.html
|
| Here's a great "Local Boy Makes Good" article and TV interview
| about Jarrett Heather from around the time the video came out,
| that was previously posted to HN -- I love his down-to-earth
| advice:
|
| Elk Grove animator thrives as 'Weird Al' Yankovic's partner in
| 'Word Crimes':
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140725043615/https://www.sacbe...
|
| Common Ground - Jarrett Heather "Word Crimes" Music Video
| Artist
|
| https://vimeo.com/103615214
|
| >"If I did fail, it would have been Al's fault for hiring a
| software developer to make a cartoon."
|
| >Word Crimes is 244 seconds long. Each second took two hours at
| the computer. 500 hours work, in all.
|
| >"Yeah, no classes, just, you know. I think people really
| underestimate the value of just sitting down and reading the
| manual."
| linker3000 wrote:
| You're on your way to a big of a list.
| jzb wrote:
| This is one of those issues where I have strong feelings that are
| in deep conflict. I agree that grammar / usage pedantry can be
| bad in many ways, that language evolves and you have to accept
| that.
|
| On the other hand... there's value in the stance that _words mean
| things_ and lazy usage that leads to "well, people _use it this
| way now_ so we 're going to update the dictionary" is frustrating
| and not for the good.
|
| I like it when people use comprise correctly. "The book series
| comprises 20 novels and 5 novellas" or "the Tarot deck comprises
| 78 cards." I don't think it's a big win that lazy usage has led
| the various dictionaries to just throw up their hands and accept
| the other usage.
|
| But I also understand that after seeing comprise used the other
| way all the time, it seems silly to argue against it after a
| point. It's a form of disagree and commit, I suppose - you have
| to know when you've lost the argument and sticking with a
| specific usage has no virtue.
|
| The hill I'll die on is "then" and "than," though. In the past 5
| or 10 years I've noticed a creeping trend of people writing "more
| then" rather than "more than." "Then" should be used for time,
| "than" is used to compare things. "More then" makes no sense as a
| comparison. But, at some point, it started becoming a more and
| more common error and _now_ I think people honestly think it 's
| correct because they've seen it online so much. Probably driven
| by autocomplete.
|
| I could totally understand going on a Wikipedia rampage and
| replacing every instance of "more then" that exists.
|
| As a side note, I find it hilarious that discussing proper
| English usage with technical folks - who are often deeply
| passionate about the correct way to do this or that in their area
| of expertise - are usually like "oh, that's not important.
| Grammar and spelling are stupid. I can't be bothered to learn
| that." But God help you if say "container" when you mean
| "container image" or something like that, because you'll get a
| lecture on how absolutely nothing you've written past that can be
| taken seriously because you got a tiny technical nuance wrong.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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 Academie calling the shots. It
| inevitably evolves, warts and all.
| housemusicfan wrote:
| 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.
| stOneskull wrote:
| they don't even have to pay their winston smiths to work
| George83728 wrote:
| 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?_
| rvnx wrote:
| "Can you xerox for me, or can you IBM my software" ?
|
| Never heard of such, I understand why they get upset if
| someone sprinkle the sentences with ads.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| "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.
| George83728 wrote:
| 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.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#Trademark
| detaro wrote:
| _Legos_ is another one of those which I never got why
| people were so insistent on quoting the corporate
| statements on it so vehemently.
| erikerikson wrote:
| See also Kleenex
| cronix wrote:
| And for that, you can just "google it"
| arrowsmith wrote:
| The classic British example is "hoover".
| sholladay wrote:
| 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.
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
| sametmax wrote:
| I think lagging behind is better than a wrong correction.
| tgv wrote:
| I think you've (inadvertently) pointed out a serious
| weakness in Wikipedia's editorial process.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 SS 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, SS 330016(1)(G), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat.
| 2147.)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You win the non-sequitur of the day award.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| 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.
| rbirkby wrote:
| Is the abomination that is "I'll revert on that" a wart?
| nicklaf wrote:
| Pedantic, perhaps, but within the purview of an editor of an
| encyclopedia enforcing a style guideline!
| chx wrote:
| Except there is no such thing. To quote.
|
| > 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.
| tasuki wrote:
| They're trying to influence the English language for sure.
| Who are you to say they're punching above their weight?
| prepend wrote:
| 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."
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is especially important in an encylopaedia.
| prepend wrote:
| I agree that there are rules. I think the subject in this
| article is not following the rules.
| nicklaf wrote:
| 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.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| And even if there was an Academie, what authority would they
| have?
|
| Eg the French have one, but that doesn't mean they have any
| moral authority.
| eastbound wrote:
| Since the topic is "who defines English", it's useful to list
| our experiences with Academie Francaise.
|
| - 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 Academie, in 1980, was Marguerite
| Yourcenar, and she probably was the most non-feminist woman
| they could choose.
|
| - Recently they opposed the "francais.e.s" style of writing,
| sticking to the classic "francais(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 Academie 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
| Academie Francaise would be interesting too.
| Glawen wrote:
| What you call feminist writing has been around in academic
| circles for a long time, it really burst out recently with
| woke movement.
|
| I like the idea about Academie, 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.
| hashmush wrote:
| 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_?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > because they used dots
|
| 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
| "francais.e.s"?
| hashmush wrote:
| 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 _francais.e.s_
| is that much worse than _francais(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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I think it's more like "s/he". It's a typographical
| notation with no common understanding of how it's
| supposed to be pronounced.
| ggm wrote:
| 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?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| 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_
| ggm wrote:
| L'academie get to wear cool robes, pretend togas. Did the
| French just invent "Les Coupeurs de la Pierre"? Did they
| kill la Voiture electrique?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I wish I got to wear robes
| nwiswell wrote:
| What's stopping you?
| ggm wrote:
| Anyone can play dress up at home. Getting enrobed by the
| premier French academic body at $50k per, that's class.
| Sorry classe
| prmoustache wrote:
| Classe.
| ggm wrote:
| Tony. I still don't understand how Tony came to mean
| classe because Tony bennett and Anthony Armstrong Jones
| aren't doing it for me.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 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).
| slily wrote:
| How is that different from any other language?
|
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 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.
| za3faran wrote:
| I'm curious if that's mainly specific to English. As an Arabic
| speaker, tremendous care and effort has been taken to preserve
| Fusha (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.
| brylie wrote:
| I'm still waiting for autocorrect to stop changing "wellbeing"
| to "well-being"
| gondaloof wrote:
| Time to start using Text Replacements. I have:
|
| - fuck -> fuck
|
| - duck -> fuck
|
| Note: I do like ducks but they're generally less common than
| fucks.
| brookst wrote:
| I miss being young. Ducks will far outnumber, eventually.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I'm not sure whether you're implying old people curse
| less or have less sex.
| rootw0rm wrote:
| maybe old people are just really into ducks?
| brookst wrote:
| Pretty much all three.
| gsinclair wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| The most fun is reading threads about cars or racing, where
| people say "break" when they mean "brake".
|
| Should we accept "break" to mean deceleration, or as a noun
| for the equipment to slow down a vehicle, then?
| int_19h wrote:
| If the majority of English speakers start using them as
| synonyms, then yes, we should accept it as the result of
| natural evolution of the language.
|
| Thing is, it's going to happen either way. The actual
| choices are being "the old man yelling at clouds" vs
| moving on.
| linker3000 wrote:
| I'm not sure if you'll win or loose that argument.
| rgoulter wrote:
| I feel that this is less extreme than using "literally"
| to mean "figuratively".
|
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No one uses "literally" to mean "figuratively".
|
| 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".
| riwsky wrote:
| 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 cliche. The augmentation is not generic; the
| coincidence is feigned in the service of irony.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > if they ever did in the first place
|
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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.
| stOneskull wrote:
| the meaning of "begs the question" has changed in this way.
| it's just about always used "incorrectly" now.
| casey2 wrote:
| 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.
| riwsky wrote:
| '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"
| rgoulter wrote:
| > If we can't say that "comprised of" is objectively wrong,
| then what _can_ we say about English?
|
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > 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.
| christkv wrote:
| Do you take or make a decision ;)
| emodendroket wrote:
| > () 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| "You" is still around so we do still have second-person
| pronouns.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Used "incorrectly" in place of thee, thou, and thy in
| familiar speech.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yes, I know, but we are not without second-person
| pronouns at all; we just no longer have separate singular
| and plural ones.
| bombcar wrote:
| Y'all is coming so you best be ready for the second
| person plural.
| emodendroket wrote:
| The long "S" was typically not used as the first letter, as I
| recall, but only mid-word.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I guess the use of the long s here was intentional, in which
| case, funny.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Lots of modern English usage was once wrong
|
| Get back to me when you can type the traditional ct ligature.
| ;D
| gbromios wrote:
| I am personally a rabid descriptivist, but I still find myself
| somehow sympathetic to this editor's cause. Much like
| "literally", losing the "official" meaning of "comprise" would
| leave us (i.e. English speakers) without a word which uniquely
| captures that meaning.
|
| People will use words however however they will, and that's their
| absolute right. And without pretending that the aforementioned
| unique quality should (or even could) justify enforcing one
| meaning over the other in the English language at large, I think
| that it's fine to have different standards for different
| contexts, and that Wikipedia is a context whose need for
| precision and clarity justifies some pedantry.
|
| If this guy's willing to put in the legwork, more power to him.
| starkparker wrote:
| It's wild that this editor has edited this out of everything but
| the Wikipedia Manual of Style:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?fulltext=Search...
| cookiengineer wrote:
| This leaves a bad taste in my mouth because of our history in
| Germany.
|
| There was a bunch of institutes for the "Erhaltung der deutschen
| Sprache" which were all founded under the umbrella of a quasi-
| propaganda organization that officially was just a society/club.
| [1]
|
| They created their own "purified" dictionary with a "clean
| language" that was trying to find replacements for foreign words,
| and strengthen the nationalistic awareness with all its perks.
|
| It was so ridiculous and opinionated that they tried to even
| enforce the use of "Nagelindiewandschlageisen" instead of using
| the Swedish word hammer.
|
| They burned all their stuff in the war, but it's somewhat
| folklore that they were heavily involved with Goebbels and his
| propaganda in WW2.
|
| They got away with that during the Nuremberg trials so
| technically this is an accusation from my side.
|
| Culturally I think this is the opposite of what cultures should
| embrace. Languages will always evolve, and you cannot prevent
| that.
|
| As a side-note: Those were so puristic people that they even
| pissed off Adolf Hitler at some point, because they criticised
| him for using foreign words in his speeches.
|
| [1]
| https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allgemeiner_Deutscher_Sprach...
| egeozcan wrote:
| We still have Turk Dil Kurumu (Institute of Turkish Language)
| in Turkey. In their website, their motto is declared as "Our
| Language is our Identity" (Dilimiz Kimligimizdir). They
| proposed so many silly words, at one point people were coming
| up with fake translations attributed to them and others were
| believing in those, turning them to urban legends. One such
| legend is my favorite:
|
| Turkish word: Tren (Train)
|
| Supposedly proposed translation: Alttan ittirmeli ustten
| tutturmeli cok oturgacli getirgecli goturgec
|
| Which can be translated to English somewhat literally as
| "Bottom pushed, top smoking, multi-person-saddle, bringer and
| deliverer of people" (My best attempt, perhaps GPTs can do
| better).
|
| However, the thing about them coming up with fake Turkish roots
| to foreign words (especially French) is totally true. One such
| example is "okul" (school) which comes from "l'ecole" but they
| long time argued that it came from the Turkish root "oku" which
| also means to study (among "read" and "send prayers"). There
| are thousands of "inventions" like these.
|
| The weird trend was (still is!) our tendency as a nation to
| invent Turkish language roots in words from other languages,
| which once lead to ridiculous stuff like the Sun Language
| Theory [0].
|
| IM(not so)HO: All language institutes should be left in the
| past, as they tend to ignore the organic properties of the
| languages they are supposed to protect.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Language_Theory
| lm28469 wrote:
| > My best attempt, perhaps GPTs can do better
|
| I doubt it's been trained on that, here is what it told me:
|
| > I'm sorry, but the phrase "Alttan ittirmeli ustten
| tutturmeli cok oturgacli getirgecli goturgec" appears to be a
| nonsensical combination of Turkish words. It doesn't have a
| clear meaning or context.
| egeozcan wrote:
| I had more luck! :)
|
| > _try a literal translation for "Alttan ittirmeli ustten
| tutturmeli cok oturgacli getirgecli goturgec"_
|
| >> ChatGPT: Sure, here's a literal translation of the
| original Turkish sentence: "Bring-take with a lot of lower-
| upper pushing-pulling, with many buttocked and seated
| ones."
|
| >> As you can see, the literal translation doesn't make
| much sense in English, and it loses the humor and rhythm of
| the original tongue twister.
|
| > _try a better translation_
|
| >> Certainly, here's a better translation of the original
| Turkish sentence that preserves the humor and rhythm:
|
| >> "Jostle and wiggle with seats too small or too big, to
| make it through this ride like a true champion of the
| middle."
|
| >> This translation captures the playful tone and the
| challenge of the original tongue twister, while using
| language that is more natural and understandable in
| English.
|
| Oh well :)
| croisillon wrote:
| you seem to be the first result with
| "Nagelindiewandschlageisen" in Google (and i guess i'll now be
| second)
| cookiengineer wrote:
| The issue with our digital library is that the search there
| is not indexed, and most old German texts are not searchable
| either [1]
|
| You can search for "Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein" or
| "Atlas der deutschen Sprache" or similar, you'll find
| references to it but not the scanned books.
|
| Welcome to the age of Digital Amnesia :'( [2]
|
| Maybe the dossier about the burned books of WW2 is a good
| start to find things about it, but it's kinda hopeless
| without a search index. Alternatively there seems to be a
| lend-able copy in the library of Dresden [3] and [4]
|
| [1] https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs
|
| [3] https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-
| bibliothek.de/verbra...
|
| [4] https://katalog.slub-dresden.de/id/0-130149888
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > ... find replacements for foreign words, and strengthen the
| nationalistic awareness with all its perks.
|
| > They created their own "purified" dictionary ...
|
| So, the "Erhaltung" effort was not to preserve existing usage,
| but to create a new vocabulary aligned with the group's ethno-
| nationalist agenda. Seems very different from TFA's agenda.
| hansworst wrote:
| I guess these were the only people to deserve the term "grammar
| nazi" then
| za3faran wrote:
| Just because there was an incident involving an extremist
| group, does not make the whole thing wrong or incorrect.
|
| As a counter example, High Arabic has been meticulously
| preserved, and Arab speakers take pride in that fact,
| regardless of the many spoken dialects that exist.
| [deleted]
| adjav wrote:
| That's like saying Classical Latin has been meticulously
| preserved. Technically true, but entirely irrelevant.
| v-erne wrote:
| I'm rereading Orwell's 1984 and this all seems a bit like
| Ministry of Truth and its whole newspeak ordeal (of course MT
| was a bit more absurd - they wanted to get rid of all ambiguity
| in language also).
|
| I wonder if this was maybe Orwell inspiration?
| cookiengineer wrote:
| The organization predates George Orwell by around 20 years...
| so I guess nope ;D
|
| But I agree with the similarities of the Ministry of Truth,
| and what it wanted to achieve. The issues as I mentioned is
| that I don't think there's a universal truth to anything; and
| therefore eradicating wordings or forms of language that are
| "not good" is a very subjective perspective.
| v-erne wrote:
| >> The organization predates George Orwell by around 20
| years... so I guess nope ;D
|
| I do not understand - OP was mentioning that the
| organization worked through second world war and was event
| at Nurimberg trials. An Orwell written 1984 in 1949. What
| do you mean that this organization predates Orwell ?
|
| I was just insinuating that Orwell might have known about
| this history (and probably about similar like this) and use
| this as inspiration for how dictatorships can use
| purification of lanuguage for their purposes (in case of
| Orwell it was more about controling "thought crimes" then
| abount simple national identification).
| zowie_vd wrote:
| The inspiration for Newspeak is Basic English, which is much
| like Esperanto but with English words (at least it's
| described as such -- I'm not actually very familiar with
| Basic English myself). Constructed languages had some avid
| supporters back in the early 20th century, looking to make
| some constructed language _the_ international language.
| Though I don 't know much about Basic English, the unique
| looks of Newspeak definitely come, directly or indirectly,
| from Esperanto's ideas for keeping the vocabulary small and
| simple. To illustrate, in Esperanto the word for "good" is
| "bona", "bad" is "malbona" ("ungood"), and "to improve" is
| "plibonigi" ("to moregoodify").
| v-erne wrote:
| I was wondering more about why he put newspeak in 1984 as a
| way for party to controll people minds and eliminate
| "though crimes". I do not know history of Basic English and
| Esperanto but it seems very improbable that their creators
| were aiming at the same goals as Ministry of Truth.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| If we are going to crack down on style, there are far bigger fish
| needing a fry. I hate how common passive voice has become, but
| I'm not going on an edit crusade to eliminate needless uses.
| tpmx wrote:
| https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c...
|
| _Every time we avoid saying "comprised of," the pedants win._
| jdougan wrote:
| Time to use more "comprised of" in wikipedia.
| cout wrote:
| I love how the last sentence in the article begins with the
| word "But". Brilliant.
| nmca wrote:
| caring about grammar is a mug's game, always has been and always
| will be.
| ychompinator wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| I'm just glad this person is using a program he built to find
| articles using this specific phrase.
| mihaic wrote:
| It was all dumb pedantry until the point where the editor talked
| about removing instances of "comprised of" inside quotes.
|
| 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.
| rossriley wrote:
| The correct way to do this in most style guides is to add (sic)
| to the quote which means you're aware of the incorrect use but
| are quoting directly.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's not incorrect use.
|
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Doing God's work, fella. This is also a pet peeve of mine.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Your peeve is comprised of people using a word to mean two
| opposite meanings, as if to make up for flammable and
| inflammable meaning the same?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Don't make me throw my Strunk & White at you.
| kazinator wrote:
| Prepositions combine with verbs to form phrasal verbs, and it's
| possible for phrasal verbs to have their own semantics that is
| removed from the base verb.
|
| For instance, "get in" or "get up" are different verbs from
| "get".
|
| It's also possible for a participial adjective (formed by "to be"
| + participle + preposition) to be an idiom.
|
| An example of this is "to be heard of" which means to be known or
| recognized. This has distinct semantics of its own, not simply
| coming from the phrasal "to hear of". You can be heard of, or
| have heard of.
|
| "to be comprised of" is the same kind of adjective, which happens
| not to be derived from a "to comprise of" verb.
|
| It's not necessary for a "V of" verb to actually exist in order
| for "be V of" to exist, and to have semantics distinct from V.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| You completely missed the point, which proves the work of this
| Wikipedian is very much necessary.
| kazinator wrote:
| There is pretty much no aspect of this grammar issue that I
| didn't already completely understand forty years ago (at
| which time I sided with the prescriptivists, my excuse having
| been age twelve).
|
| It's perfectly clear why some people don't like "comprised
| of", and what their reasoning is. That reasoning is seriously
| flawed, though, on multiple accounts.
|
| The first is that language changes. This particular ship
| sailed so long ago, that it literally could only have sailed;
| the age of steam power had not yet dawned. In that time we
| have seen changes like _sensitivity_ taking the place of
| _sensibility_.
|
| Secondly, "be comprised of" follows sound word-forming
| processes inherent in the English language. It's obeying
| certain rules, just not ones that are above the
| sophistication of internet grammar cops. There is no rule
| that the participial adjective "be comprised of" has to
| relate to the verb "comprise" in a specific way.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| First of all, he seems like a perfectly happy person, so I'm
| assuming saying he's "sad" is attacking him personally because
| you don't agree with him.. which is sad.
|
| Second, comprised already means "consists of". Unlike your
| example, heard, which is the past tense if hear. So "comprised
| of" essentially means "consists of of" which is nonsense. Hence
| why it's better to say "comprises" rather than "comprised of".
| kazinator wrote:
| Meaning is not macro replacement.
|
| If we suppose that "comprised" means "consists of", it does
| not follow that "comprised of" means "consists of of".
|
| (Setting aside, for a moment, that "comprised" does not mean
| "consists of").
|
| Just like "make" possibly meaning "create" doesn't imply that
| "make up" can turn into "create up".
|
| To comprise means for something to contain certain components
| (usually with a nuance that the list of components is
| complete). Since at least the 18th century, it has been used
| in a reverse way: components can comprise the whole. Charles
| Dickens used it in this reverse sense. It is from this
| reverse usage that the participial adjective arises: if
| components can comprise the whole, the whole is comprised of
| those components. Both the reverse usage and the adverb have
| been disputed, but are now hundreds of years old. The
| popularity of the participial adjective has wildly increased
| in the last half century.
|
| There is a logical reason behind the the reversal of
| _comprise_ that doesn 't seem to get discussed.
|
| Because comprise has a completeness nuance, it is actually a
| form of equivalence: if X comprises of parts A, B and C, it
| means it is equal to those parts. There is nothing else to X
| but A, B and C. Since equivalance commutes, comprise is
| expected to follow suit: A, B and C comprise X.
|
| Comprise really means something like "exactly covers" or
| "corresponds to in an exhaustive whole/part relationship".
|
| All that has happened is that we have lifted the restriction
| that the left operand of _comprise_ must be the aggregate,
| and the right operand be the individual items.
|
| > _attacking him personally because you don't agree with him_
|
| I was going to write "pseudo-intellectual twit on a lunatic
| correction rampage", but I went with "sad" to be nice.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| If you look up the word "comprised" in multiple
| dictionaries they all define it including "consists of",
| "composed of", "made up of" etc. So right off the bat your
| argument is flawed. Perhaps you would like to define it the
| way you did, and perhaps some set of people you converse
| with may, but the point of a dictionary is so we can define
| words in ways we all agree on so we all understand each
| other.
|
| As we have learned from Godel, language is complete, but
| not consistent. Unlike math. So trying to argue about
| "comprise" using a more consistent logical framework of A,
| B, C, commutation, etc. is already a losing battle.
|
| I could argue for a long time, having been both an English
| major, and a software engineer but the short of it is that
| words are tools.
|
| Don't use a hammer for a screw.
|
| Sure you're allowed to, and the language can evolve into
| everyone using a hammer on a screw, but the language losses
| something in the process.
|
| There have always been, and always will be editors and
| people like the Wikipedia editor who help proscribe the
| usage of words to convey the correct and precise meaning to
| as many people as possible. The goal is to allow as many
| people as possible to have as precise an understanding of
| what is being communicated, with as much precision as is
| possible for something the must be complete but can't be
| consistent. An example can be seen, even on this very page,
| of English learners, non-native speakers, thankful for what
| some call "pedantry", so they can understand what is being
| said.
|
| Without that, language can often become siloed, with the
| evolution of pidgins, and creoles etc, with the consequence
| that fewer and fewer people understand each other.
|
| Imagine your grandmother trying to read and understand half
| of what is written on Twitter and TikTok.
|
| For content that matters, and that includes Wikipedia, and
| published texts, editors who work for those publishers are
| the invisible people behind the scenes helping us all
| understand eachother.
|
| You can scoff at "pseudo-intellectual twits", but people
| often fail to realize that the world is often a better,
| richer place for intellectuals. The people who spend time
| on things most people find pedantic, often end up inventing
| things like transistors, understanding quantum physics,
| etc.
|
| Software engineers often appreciate those types of results,
| but ignore or sweep away the results that lead to richer
| arts, language and cultural heritage.
| p-e-w wrote:
| 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."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprised_of
| soraminazuki wrote:
| > > 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
| samirillian wrote:
| I don't agree with your 1984 analogy at all.
|
| 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.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| hey qq who decides what correct is
| hgsgm wrote:
| The marketplace of ideas.
| samirillian wrote:
| 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.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| 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.
| samirillian wrote:
| My main point is only that comparing this to newspeak is
| totally backwards.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| samirillian wrote:
| You literally didn't answer my one question, yet you keep
| asking more. Even Socrates answered questions when asked.
|
| I could engage your other points, but why bother
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| You want me to answer questions like "how do we make
| judgements about things?" I don't think this is that sort
| of venue sorry.
| samirillian wrote:
| Okay now you're just trolling me. The question that
| starts with "I have a question for you." Did you look at
| the Orwell link.
|
| > 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Oh I think you're talking to two different people here,
| sorry. I never mentioned orwell.
| logicchains wrote:
| >I wonder if the editor read "1984" and straight up copied
| its ideas
|
| Maybe George Orwell copied the idea from Esperanto. For
| instance, "dark" in Esperanto is "notlight", and left is
| "notright".
| robswc wrote:
| I can get behind the "notlight" but "notright"... feels
| like something my brain would never get used to haha.
| Izkata wrote:
| Because based on the words it's composed of, it's
| different from "left" - it would include "forward" and
| "backward".
|
| Similarly for "notlight" implying including twilight,
| which "dark" does not.
| robocat wrote:
| > twilight
|
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| robocat wrote:
| Literally see maladroit
| coding123 wrote:
| No one is going to fight this person trying to erase a word
| though.
| ttiurani wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| tysam_and wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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".
| skupig wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| fatfingerd wrote:
| 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.
| lal wrote:
| 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."
| fatfingerd wrote:
| 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.
| hhjinks wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| yellowapple wrote:
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| > but the end result does read better
|
| What tiny fraction of one percent of the edits would you
| estimate you have actually read?
| eynsham wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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.
| haswell wrote:
| > _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.
| lolinder wrote:
| I was responding to this:
|
| > 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=%22comprise
| d+o...
| Macha wrote:
| > 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/
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >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.
| pbreit wrote:
| 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?
|
| Is there some way to see what edits were made?
| Bud wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| sgustard wrote:
| 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?
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| morsch wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| regularfry wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| 112233 wrote:
| 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.
| tysam_and wrote:
| 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.
| morsch wrote:
| Human languages are highly redundant, for the most part.
| The communication channel is lossy, so you add parity bits
| and error correction codes.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > is it a specific, known house you are going to
|
| "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").
| ghayes wrote:
| > > It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.
|
| Auto-antonyms are actually quite common in English.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Parent is still correct about it being illogical though.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Interesting. I wonder if the word "presently" could count. It
| can mean both "soon" or "currently".
| singleshot_ wrote:
| That's an arguable factoid.
| grammarxcore wrote:
| One of my favorites is "nonplussed," because its evolution
| into two opposite things is both generational and split
| across British vs North American English.
| Isinlor wrote:
| Slavic languages do perfectly fine without articles. As Polish
| speaker I say leave them out ;) .
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > As Polish speaker I say leave them out
|
| "As Polish speaker, I say leave out"?
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| 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.
| FabHK wrote:
| > That's true for many, many other words.
|
| 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?
| mjw_byrne wrote:
| 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.
| 317070 wrote:
| Those are just autantonyms, and English has plenty already.
|
| 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.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| It is objected to in some writing.
|
| "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.
| prepend wrote:
| > It is objected to in some writing.
|
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| "Wicked" to mean "good" is slang. So is "cool", used in
| that sense. Slang is not encyclopaedic language.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| I think auto-antonyms should be avoided in an encyclopedia.
| (And also in scientific publications, text books, and
| laws.)
| Jabbles wrote:
| <incorrect statement>
| brainwad wrote:
| It's presumably the adjective for when something can be
| impregnated.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > Your castle is surprised...
|
| (Ross, Act 4, Scene 3, Macbeth)
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| 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'"?
| hhjinks wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| No - "The United States comprises 50 states".
| [deleted]
| yellowapple wrote:
| 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.
| dwringer wrote:
| 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.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Peter wasn't shot by Paul, it was John that was shot by Mark,
| and the whole Paul thing is a hoax.
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| "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.
| kevinpet wrote:
| 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.
| inimino wrote:
| "impose my preference on everyone else"
|
| 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?
| prepend wrote:
| 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."
|
| [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22comprised+of%22+site%3
| Any...
| inimino wrote:
| 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.
| dllthomas wrote:
| > "com" + "prise" = "grasp together".
|
| 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."
| vehemenz wrote:
| > Would that make it correct? Nonsense.
|
| 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.
| stOneskull wrote:
| > Just leave them out, right? "I go house."
|
| the ministry of truth is easier to write as minitrue, yeah.
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| > 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.
| oezi wrote:
| Rando edits by pedantic a*-hats who don't care about the
| actual topic but their weird crusade. /s
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| "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.
| adjav wrote:
| There is no "standard English." There sure as hell isn't a
| consensus that "comprised of" is incorrect, or it wouldn't
| have been used over 90k times.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| 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?
| hulitu wrote:
| Romanes eunt domum was good enough. /s
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| 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.
| tysam_and wrote:
| Plus, generally languages are comprised of, among other things,
| a hodgepodge of colloquialisms that add flavor to the
| discourse.
| Bud wrote:
| [dead]
| bspammer wrote:
| Flavor isn't part of the Wikipedia style guide though. The
| language used across articles is intentionally conservative
| and boring.
| dmonitor wrote:
| just wait until they learn about the etymology of awful and
| awesome. both come from the word awe, but mean completely
| opposite things.
| ouid wrote:
| 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)
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The alphabet contains five vowels is a completely different
| statement from the alphabet is comprised of five vowels.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sure, they aren't always one-for-one swaps.
|
| 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.
| redmorphium wrote:
| "My itinerary is comprised of four hotel stays." --->
|
| "My itinerary is comPOSED of four hotel stays."
|
| or
|
| "My itinerary coNSISTS of four hotel stays."
|
| Much better.
| jasomill wrote:
| "I'll be staying at four hotels."
| Izkata wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| yellowapple wrote:
| "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).
| redmorphium wrote:
| 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..."
| prepend wrote:
| "I'll stay at four hotels."
| rvnx wrote:
| This. Simple, direct, and much more intelligible.
| nhinck2 wrote:
| ?? If you say so
| croisillon wrote:
| i don't know if it's illogical but there are a lot of words
| that mean two opposite things: http://www.fun-with-
| words.com/nym_autoantonyms.html
| riwsky wrote:
| > That's irrelevant to the current meaning of the word. This is
| called an "etymological fallacy"[1].
|
| Did you read your own link? It explicitly calls out absolute
| neglect of the etymology as fallacious, as well.
| drewcoo wrote:
| >> It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.
|
| 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!
| riffraff wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a number that change over time; awful and terrible
| for example. Very old hymns talk about how awful and
| terrible God is, for example.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I mean, it's accurate either way, at least in the Old
| Testament.
| emodendroket wrote:
| While we're on trivia, the etymology of this word is the
| Latin for "leaving the flock." The Japanese word Ba Qun ,
| meaning "exceptional," has this exact same etymology except
| by way of Chinese rather than Latin.
| phoenixreader wrote:
| I was going to mention "sanction". Happy to learn more words
| like that!
| zephrx1111 wrote:
| Sorry, but as a non-native English speaker, "compromised of"
| confuses me more, I guess mostly because I was exposed to the
| other meaning too much.
| Izkata wrote:
| "Compromised" and "comprised" are different words.
| _jab wrote:
| How many people, I wonder, criticize this user's actions as
| pedantic, and yet themselves regularly make use of and appreciate
| code formatters like Black, Prettier, or yapf?
|
| It's the exact same problem.
| hgsgm wrote:
| This thread is now larger than the content of all those edits.
| Good job, team!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm not saying she's wrong, but:
|
| 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...
| inimino wrote:
| Note that this is using the word "comprising" correctly, so is
| irrelevant to the topic of the incorrect usage.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| TBH, I found her article intolerably tedious, so I didn't
| study it all.
|
| I did notice she singled out "comprising of" for abuse, which
| it definitely deserves. In a claim you write "comprising" or
| "comprised of."
| bdowling wrote:
| Claim language is very specific:
|
| 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...
| paulcole wrote:
| Remember when the Comic Sans creator said, "If you love Comic
| Sans you don't know much about typography and you should get a
| new hobby. And if you hate Comic Sans you also don't know much
| about typography and should get a new hobby.
|
| This is the grammar equivalent of that.
| subroutine wrote:
| 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...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150214014338/http://chronicle....
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Mine is "try and" - Please, please stop saying this. It doesn't
| make any sense (except in the rare cases that it does, like "try
| and fail," unless you really are trying TO fail, in which case it
| doesn't)
|
| The correct phrase is "try TO"
|
| I'm on a one-person crusade to fix this throughout the English
| speaking world, by occasionally ranting about it to a relatively
| small group of indifferent people on the internet. Is it working?
| srcreigh wrote:
| "Try" is it's own verb, and the x in "try and x" is also a
| verb/verb phrase. Read and weep!
| a2800276 wrote:
| As in: "Will this work?" - "Why don't you try and see?" ?
|
| This is perfectly acceptable in my opinion, it's an elliptical
| form of: "Why don't you try (to do whatever "this" is) and see
| (if it will work)?".
|
| "Comprise" means the opposite of what people who use "comprised
| of" think it means.
|
| While "1
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Just wants a way to pad his score
| Gimpei wrote:
| Could somebody do the same for "nonplussed"? We have now given
| that poor poor word two opposite meanings. Currently, I have no
| idea what somebody means when they say they're nonplussed.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I will say that word is _always_ confusing, perhaps the #1
| example.
|
| Because with other classic examples, such as the verb "to
| table" meaning the opposite thing in the US and UK, you can at
| least always figure it out from context (if not from the
| accent, ha). And we know that "inflammable" is never used to
| mean fireproof.
|
| But the two opposite meanings of "nonplussed", there's very
| often _zero_ contextual indication as to which meaning is
| intended. And both meanings are used frequently, so it 's in
| this total unresolved limbo state.
|
| For me, it's the one word I won't use at all, precisely for
| this reason. There's simply no way to be properly understood.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Worse evolving opposite meanings is a real problem. Another
| example that became popular this century is 'entitled'. Now it
| means both 'being entitled to something' and 'wrongly thinking
| you're entitled to something'. So now a word we don't have a
| simple alternative for is less useful because it has become
| ambiguous. It also retroactively makes past uses ambiguous.
| This has a real cost to communication and the remedy is to
| enforce style to avoid it happening to other words.
| PKop wrote:
| Good for him, we should uphold standards and enforce correct
| grammar.
| xupybd wrote:
| Why would someone invest so much energy removing something that
| is common as mud, and universally understood?
| bruce343434 wrote:
| I think the actual article/essay answers that question pretty
| well...
| [deleted]
| Pazzaz wrote:
| As a non-native English speaker, I appreciate pedantic editors
| like this one a lot. When I read Wikipedia, I want the text to be
| easy to understand and consistent with the rest of Wikipedia and
| when I edit, I want people to improve what I wrote. I wish
| everything I wrote had a copy-editor as pedantic as Wikipedia
| power users.
|
| Some people are complaining about overly zealous editors who
| delete a lot of and as an Inclusionist [1] I understand the
| sentiment. I think deleting information from Wikipedia is pretty
| bad. But being pedantic about English is not deleting
| information, it's improving the transmission of information.
|
| [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism
| relaxing wrote:
| As a native English speaker let me assure you this user has
| done nothing for the understandability or consistency of the
| text.
| dm319 wrote:
| If he's on the side of Fowler's modern English, I'm on his side.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > Not everyone agrees "comprised of" is wrong, but no one finds
| it better than the alternatives.
|
| Brilliant way to make a decision in a community. I wish more
| discussions had room for such thought patterns.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| > It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.
|
| Maybe he can tackle "literally" once he is finished with
| "comprise".
| fknorangesite wrote:
| The use of "literally" as an intensifier goes back centuries.
| I'm not sure why people act as if it's some kind of new
| development.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| The acceptance of 'literally' to mean 'not literally' means
| English now has no simple, consistent way to say something is
| literally literal. At least linguistics nerds are happy though!
| albert_e wrote:
| That's oversight
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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).
|
| No hate intended here. It's just musing out loud.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Intend all the hate you want, they don't care, they will
| mandate their world even when it's wrong to do so.
|
| If hate is what would get them to stop, they'd have quit before
| they began.
| askin4it wrote:
| 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.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| That whole page is comprised of the most pedantic arguments for
| what amounts to policing an evolving language
| LesZedCB wrote:
| prescriptivists are a real bummer
| riwsky wrote:
| Or rather: most people in everyday usage would describe
| prescriptivists as a real bummer
| devnullbrain wrote:
| It's not a sports team. If it was, editors, teachers and code
| reviewers would be its supporters. I'd prefer not to live in
| a world without those.
| [deleted]
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Couldn't it be argued that it's totally okay to have two separate
| meanings for "to comprise" as a direct verb (A comprises B), and
| mean the opposite when used in indirect form (B is comprised of
| A)?
| andrewshadura wrote:
| The issue here is that comprise means "being composed of". So
| instead of "A comprises B and C" people write "A is comprised
| of B and C".
| fwlr wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| kazinator wrote:
| > _It 's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things._
|
| LOL, can't wait for this person to dedicate their life to fixing
| the Japanese wikipedia.
| ggm wrote:
| Can they be persuaded to invest time in autocorrecing learnings
| to lessons and de-verbalating words like "medalled" and
| "podiumed"
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| This essay and this crusade are a perfect embodiment of why no
| one takes Wikipedia seriously (even if we all use it as a
| starting place for research).
|
| I cannot imagine dedicating 15+ years of my life over something
| that is grammatically incorrect in some contexts at its worst --
| but is frequently just a stylistic choice.
|
| Of all the hills to die on and disrupt prose over, the author
| chooses this one. Wikipedia is full of poor writing and sentence
| construction, but this is worthy of 90,000 edits? Unbelievable.
|
| Telling someone to "touch grass" is incredibly overdone and
| passe, but this person really needs to touch grass.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| > So my actual process involves a program that does the
| Wikipedia search (it just fetches the same URL as you fetch
| when you type in the Wikipedia search box) and compares the
| list to the previously fetched lists. It selects only those
| articles that weren't in one of those lists in the previous six
| months and generates a web page linking to them, in
| alphabetical order. I browse that page and proceed to edit them
| in order. I edit about 60 articles a week this way, typically
| within a few days of the article being created or edited to
| require it.
|
| Sounds like it barely takes any effort.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| This is one of the bad things about Wikipedia, letting people
| with pet peeves or obsessions having so much editorial control.
|
| Ultimately it's a small price to pay though.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Probably more insidious that shills working for whatever
| bogeyman you'd find most concerning can pull all the same
| levers.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Is there a way to prevent people from doing petty and unnecessary
| vandalism to articles you've authored or are you pretty much at
| their mercy?
| crote wrote:
| 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.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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...
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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...
| jl6 wrote:
| The cleansed version actually looks like an encyclopedia
| article, whereas the original just looks like a data dump.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Garner's English Usage, 2016 edition, page 191:
|
| > Erroneous Use of _is comprised of_ :
|
| > The phrase _is comprised of_ is increasingly common but has
| long been considered poor usage. It was not a frequent
| collocation until about 1950. Replace it with some other, more
| accurate phrase -- e.g. ...
|
| > "Moreover, the crowd in the mysterious room _was comprised of_
| [read _comprised_ or _was comprised of_ ] adults, and Harry knew
| there were not nearly that many teachers at Hogwarts" J.K Rowling
| ...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| "Comprises" means "consists of". So "comprised of" means
| "consists of of". It's not just that some people dislike it; it's
| simply wrong.
|
| Whenever I come across the word "utilize" in WP, I change it to
| "use" (with the edit comment "Don't utilize utilize"). Nobody's
| ever reverted me for that.
|
| I think there is a proper use for the verb "utilize": it means
| "to render useful". But usually, it's just a substitute for "use"
| that sounds more erudite, or something. I think to utilize
| something is to take something that is useless, and turn it into
| something useful. That's not the same as using the thing.
| dheera wrote:
| I think people mean to say "composed of" but then they change
| it to "comprised" because it sounds more high-class and elite.
| mmcnl wrote:
| What is "WP"?
| js2 wrote:
| Wikipedia
| kaetemi wrote:
| Wifi Port.
| kaetemi wrote:
| It's the port in your Wifi over Data box, that hackers can
| connect their wireless Wifi cable extender to, so you can
| consummate all the exoteric phonography that the
| information highway is compromised of.
| coding123 wrote:
| Word perfect or word press
| ddoolin wrote:
| WordPress.
|
| Wickedly Pernicious.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| AAC.
|
| Acronyms are confusing.
|
| But some people also say AC -acronyms confuse.
|
| I thought of a byzantine WordPress site with editing history
| or something as well, for a moment, despite the context.
|
| Wait, WP for Wikipedia isn't even an acronym, just an
| abbreviation!
|
| If you read this far, sorry for wasting your time.
|
| I'm still learning :high_five:
| denton-scratch wrote:
| WP for "Wikipedia" is built into the site; most of the
| internal guidance pages can be accessed via titles such as
| "WP:WikiProject".
|
| [Edit] I generally don't use such acronyms without spelling
| the term out in full first. But spelling things out in full
| _every time_ comes across as wordy and pedantic.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. I wouldn't argue against
| abbreviations per se. Was just in the mood for a whimsy
| post.
|
| And, in defense of WP, W would not be a better option
| really, except for URLs.
|
| Ironically, my locale's WP edition has failed to or
| didn't want to adopt /w/ instead of /wiki/ as the leading
| path segment for Wikipedia articles, as opposed to the
| English edition.
|
| Also, thinking about this makes me want to search for
| edit wars and discussion about US vs British spelling on
| Wikipedia.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| "Yeah no" and "No yeah" mean clear and different things,
| despite being superficially total nonsense. I've probably heard
| "comprised of" thousands of times in my life to mean "made of."
| What's wrong with phrases having meaning?
| panxyh wrote:
| Yeah no, they are not _total_ nonsense.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| That's my point. If you just look at phrases as meaning the
| sum of their words then this phrase makes no sense. But it
| _is_ a phrase that has an understood meaning.
| bombcar wrote:
| Comprises is not comprised.
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Semantic drift means it is no longer the wrong word.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What do you call the intermediate stage where half of
| people have one definition and other half have a
| different one?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| In this case, history.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| As my parent post points out, it is certainly not history
| in the legal system and other fields where precise and
| Technical meanings matter.
| Retric wrote:
| That only applies in cases of ambiguity at which point
| it's often best to avoid both the old and new
| definitions.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Wait until it drifts off further into "it is compromised of".
| (You can Google that, and you'll find it used in papers
| already.)
| smcl wrote:
| 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.
| groestl wrote:
| > 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).
| sunir wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Not entirely. Consists of (without a modifier like "in part")
| usually strongly implies completeness or functional
| completeness ("active ingredients") in the subsequent list,
| comprises is more free to be incomplete.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _it 's simply wrong_
|
| That makes as much sense as saying that "ne... pas" in French
| is a double negative and therefore "simply wrong" to use as a
| straight negative.
|
| No -- language isn't math, and English and other languages are
| chock-full of inconsistencies and seemingly "illogical" things.
| Language ultimately rests on _convention_ , on real life usage
| -- not logic. Arguing that a common usage is illogical is
| fighting against the tide.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| "ne... pas" in French is nothing more nor less than the
| correct way of formulating certain kinds of statements
| containing a negative. If you left out either of "ne" or
| "pas" in such a construction, people would either laugh, or
| assume you were some kind of primitive language generator.
|
| It's absurd that English speakers are so tolerant of
| incorrect usage. It's partly the pedagogic principle that
| "All shall have prizes" at the school sports day; but it's
| significant that if you try to correct incorrect usage, you
| get referred to literary figures such as poets and
| playwrights that used some term incorrectly, as if people
| like (e.g.) Pepys are authorities.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| "Laugh or assume you're a robot" isn't quite right, though;
| skipping the "ne" is common in informal contexts.
| JackFr wrote:
| There was a fascinating article in the Economist many years
| ago about the worldwide predominance of English. (This was
| pre ubiquitous internet.)
|
| The reasons given were 1) British colonialism 2) Post WWII
| American hegemony 3) No one cares if you speak it poorly.
| monetus wrote:
| Ever read pidgin? Mutually intelligible, really neat.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/pidgin
| ghaff wrote:
| >3) No one cares if you speak it poorly
|
| And this is maybe just a slightly more charitable
| rephrasing of #3 but very open to loan words and
| alternative ways of phrasing things.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It 's absurd that English speakers are so tolerant of
| incorrect usage._
|
| Or, one can just as easily say it's absurd that certain
| pedants are so intolerant of evolving usage.
|
| Language does not proceed by logical deduction. It is
| shared convention, no more and no less. If a majority of
| people think a new usage is right, then that's just what
| the usage _is_.
|
| When you say "incorrect usage", incorrect according to
| whom? You? A minority? Why should anyone else take that
| seriously when they're already communicating just fine?
| vidarh wrote:
| Or they'll assume you're a native speaker familiar with a
| given dialect or specific idioms. Dropping "ne" is _common_
| in spoken French many places to the point that to many
| speakers you 'll sound stilted and/or old if you included
| it - the first time I was told (as a teenager) I sounded
| "old" for using ne..pas was around 30 years ago.
|
| The son in the family I stayed with on on a school trip
| back then found it _hilarious_ how often I used "ne ...
| pas" instead of just "pas", e.g. "c'est pas grave" [1]
| rather than "ce n'est pas grave".
|
| [1] Here's a song titled "c'est pas grave" by French group
| Columbine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yyjPxvNLGk
| arrowsmith wrote:
| > If you left out either of "ne" or "pas" in such a
| construction, people would either laugh, or assume you were
| some kind of primitive language generator.
|
| Isn't it common to drop the "ne" in colloquial speech?
| umanwizard wrote:
| "Common" is an understatement. It's practically
| universal. You will sound weird if you systematically
| include "ne", like you learned to speak by reading books
| and have never communicated with a real person.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > If you left out either of "ne" or "pas" in such a
| construction, people would either laugh, or assume you were
| some kind of primitive language generator.
|
| You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
| Please learn French before spouting off so confidently
| about it.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I know this is shocking to people but if a phrase is
| systematically used by native speakers, it is then part of the
| language. There is no notion of native speakers being
| systematically wrong in linguistics. It wouldn't make sense
| scientifically.
|
| In order to examine natural languages using the scientific
| method, linguists gather data (i.e. native speakers' spoken or
| written communication) and then analyze this (i.e. find
| predictive models of this data). Gathering data, then claiming
| the data is wrong is epistemologically unfounded. Languages
| simply _are_ the way they are. This would be like gathering
| data from Hubble and then deciding photons are wrong because
| their behavior mismatch with Newtonian laws.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Who are the native speakers in the case of Wikipedia?
| neltnerb wrote:
| I think you have the crux of it... this person has a very
| long essay explaining why this change makes it more
| comprehensible to more readers.
|
| This is what an editor should do. What's the problem? Let
| them spend their time on it if they like, it seems like
| most times no one even notices the change.
|
| It's not being pedantic if you are doing it to improve real
| life readability based on real feedback, even if it seems
| trivial.
| philwelch wrote:
| u are looking at this from the pov of a linguist, not an
| editor...u might think this comment im writing isnt
| "systematically wrong" or whatever but u wouldn't write a
| wikipedia article this way
|
| seriously tho if descriptivists had the courage of their
| convictions they would just stop capitalizing, there's no
| reason to
| matteoraso wrote:
| >Languages simply are the way they are.
|
| Not necessarily true. There are authoritative guides on
| English (e.g. the Webster dictionary) that grammar is
| measured up against. In fact, the main reason we have
| standardized spelling instead of people just writing what
| seemed right is because people actively tried to enforce a
| right and wrong way of spelling.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > There are authoritative guides on English (e.g. the
| Webster dictionary)
|
| This is exactly wrong. Webster's is not prescriptivist; a
| dictionary _describes_ a language as it is, not as it
| "should" be (indeed, there is no such thing).
| JW_00000 wrote:
| OK, but does that mean the phrase should be used as such in
| an encyclopedia?
|
| For instance, the word "biweekly" now means both "once every
| two weeks" and "twice per week". I don't mind usage of that
| word for those two meanings. Obviously, linguists can gather
| data and analyze how it's being used. They may conclude that
| one meaning was more favored 50 years ago and the other
| meaning is now.
|
| But when I'm reading an encyclopedia, I'd prefer it to avoid
| this ambiguous word.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I only ever thought biweekly was synonymous with
| fortnightly
| bbor wrote:
| Does "utilize" really lead to such ambiguities? Or
| "comprised of"? I'd be really surprised... maybe in rare
| cases? I haven't read the entire linked manifesto so maybe
| he has some examples!
| ghaff wrote:
| Biweekly (and probably semi-weekly) is one of those words
| that should be generally avoided. It's like depending on
| some less obvious operator precedence rule rather than
| parentheses. You may be technically correct, but you
| shouldn't do it that way because others will misunderstand
| you.
|
| ADDED: I'm genuinely confused why people would disagree
| with this (which is in multiple style guides). I assume
| it's some variant of I know what it really means and, if
| someone else doesn't, that's their problem. But that seems
| antithetical to writing to communicate something to an
| audience.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But there's nothing ambiguous about "is comprised of", so
| what's the problem?
| emberfiend wrote:
| Your example doesn't map, though. There is no ambiguity
| when I say "curry is comprised of beans and carrots". It's
| just a way of using the word that some native speakers have
| used their whole lives and other native speakers find
| jarring.
| cryptonector wrote:
| There is a tension between prescriptivism and descriptivism,
| and it has to do with the rate at which the language evolves.
| Prescriptivism resists language evolution. Decriptivism
| allows the language to evolve as fast as people wish to
| evolve it.
|
| Some rate of language change has to be accepted, but it
| needn't be as fast as if we rejected all prescriptivism.
|
| We each prescribe or refuse to prescribe language rules as we
| see fit, and thus the language evolves at some natural rate.
|
| We do need _some_ grammar /spelling pedantry.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| > Prescriptivism resists language evolution. Decriptivism
| allows the language to evolve as fast as people wish to
| evolve it.
|
| This is nonsense. Do you really believe language is subject
| to intentional human control?
|
| (Of course if a dictator comes and kills half a million
| people for things including changing language like it
| happened in my country, then it is, but this is a very rare
| exception.)
| bscphil wrote:
| > Decriptivism allows the language to evolve as fast as
| people wish to evolve it.
|
| More importantly, taken to an extreme, descriptivism
| describes language in the way a map describes the
| territory. _Any_ time a person speaks and is understood, no
| matter how _badly_ , end-stage descriptivism has to allow
| their diction as syntactically and semantically valid in
| the language in which they spoke. The most you can say is
| that some expressions are rarer than others (you see "was
| done well" much more often than you see "was done good").
|
| But this is also a _wrong_ way of talking about language,
| just as much the old prescriptivist way was wrong. People
| are not static language replication machines, learning how
| to speak _purely_ from imitation of their elders and
| community, and observed from on high by language
| anthropologists seeking to observe how they behave. They
| are concept-builders, rule-learners. They have a sense for
| not just how to speak in particular cases, but also what it
| is to speak _well_. It is this public sense of correct
| speech that is the subject of evolution over time, and is
| therefore also the proper target for descriptivist accounts
| of language.
|
| Writing is similar to speech, but in writing most people
| are even more keyed to correctness, and less keyed to
| achieving the bare minimum of communication. Rules are
| stickier. We ought to understand this Wikipedia editor not
| as a noxious outsider to the evolution of language, who
| like the anthropologist inserts prescriptivist rules where
| they are unwanted, but as someone who is part of the normal
| evolution of language itself and therefore part of the
| terrain to be described! There have always been people who
| have been sticklers for particular rules.
| canjobear wrote:
| In principle prescriptivism is about slowing language
| evolution, but in practice almost all of the prescriptive
| rules that people talk about (including opposing "comprised
| of") are not based in any historical usage pattern. The
| prohibitions on ending a sentence with a preposition,
| "less" before a count noun, etc. are all made up out of
| thin air.
| pklausler wrote:
| He's not correcting the usage of people chatting on street
| corners here. He's fixing bad usage in an encyclopedia.
|
| Good usage improves clarity. This is why editors have style
| guides.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Except it's not bad usage. Even Merriam-Webster approves,
| it's the second definition listed, and an additional usage
| note validating it:
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprise
| pklausler wrote:
| "Bad usage" or not depends on one's style guide. The
| better ones are better.
| crazygringo wrote:
| "Better ones are better" is meaningless because there's
| no objective standard. What I think is better, you may
| think is worse. All we can say about style guides is,
| "different ones are different". They reflect the needs of
| each publication. And Wikipedia's style guide takes no
| stance in this case.
|
| It may not be your personal _preferred_ usage, but it
| certainly isn 't _bad_ usage if a major American
| dictionary approves.
| bjourne wrote:
| It depends on whether you presume language knowledge to be
| descriptive or prescriptive. Neither view is right or wrong.
| For example, I'm a native speaker of C, yet my syntax errors
| are still errors.
| spacephysics wrote:
| Fully agree, same can be said about ever young generation's
| slang.
|
| What "bet", "cap", "rizz" and others used by the younger
| population isn't _wrong_ , it's different and an evolution of
| certain terms.
|
| I don't study linguistics, but I can be sure there are terms
| we use today and take as normal-speak that were once the
| center of a younger generation's slang vernacular.
|
| An extreme example is the word retard. Years ago in normal
| speak you could say "After the EPA enacted stricter emissions
| regulations, this initially retarded the development of
| sports cars until new technology was implemented" other
| obvious examples are the medical angle of the word.
|
| Today, you _could_ use the word in such a way, it's
| _technically_ correct, however you'll most likely get some
| odd looks.
|
| Most uses of it today are either in specific comedic circles,
| or derogatorily towards another person/thing/animal etc
| caconym_ wrote:
| A "systematic" change in the meaning of a word or phrase
| means that someone used it wrong once and enough people
| followed them in their wrongness that it became the norm.
| It's reasonable to say that once a new meaning has been taken
| up by the majority in this way it's not wrong anymore, but
| there is also a broad continuum between old usages and
| majority uptake of new usages where some users of the
| language in question may reasonably object to the latter.
|
| For instance, I was once CC'd on an email thread at work
| where a senior leader made an obvious typo in reference to
| some Thing and everybody else on the thread blindly parroted
| it. This "alternate" usage was established and used
| systematically in the local context, but it led to a
| significant decline in general clarity and interpretability,
| and it was also not durable beyond the context of that
| thread. It was a mistake, simple as that.
|
| "Comprised of" is probably past the threshold at this point,
| much like "rate of speed" and "how <thing> looks like" and so
| on and so forth. But--and I know this is shocking to some
| people--"correct" use of language does have significant
| advantages for communicating clearly, especially in writing.
| Prescriptivism and descriptivism both have their adherents
| because neither is _right_ or _wrong_ in the naive absolutist
| sense--balance is key.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's nonsense, not all native speakers have equal verbal
| fluency. Certainly new words or sentence constructions can be
| coined for amusement or efficiency and may catch on at scale,
| but if there were no such thing as correctness then there
| wouldn't be any such concept as incoherence.
| DANmode wrote:
| This just made me realize the trend of using "myriad" in HN
| comments died out.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I would say "comprises" in the active voice means
| "encompasses". X not just contains Y, but X is made up of Y.
|
| When X comprises Y, then Y constitutes X.
|
| Or to use passive: X is made up of Y, X is comprised of Y. Y
| are encompassed by X.
|
| "Is comprised of" is a totally cromulent use and I would claim
| it is more logical and more easily understood than the "X
| comprises Y" usage.
| SPBS wrote:
| Interesting tidbits to know about the English language but I'm
| not about to correct someone for that.
| tvararu wrote:
| The Romanian for "to use" is "a utiliza." Bilingual speakers
| might find "utilize" more familiar and choose it as such. The
| same might be true of other languages, and a possible
| explanation for its popularity.
|
| In every other respect, "use" is indeed better.
| make3 wrote:
| comprises means whatever people use it for
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree with you. Frankly, utilize instead of use just sounds
| finicking. As an engineer, I'd use it in a corporate powerpoint
| that I make to impress management. These kind of things have no
| place in Wikipedia.
| alch- wrote:
| > I'd use it
|
| I think you mean "leverage".
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| This post is comprised good points.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > This post is comprised good points.
|
| This post comprises good points.
|
| This post consists of good points.
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| I only think it did in the past though.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Then it should have been "This post comprised good
| points."
|
| The "is" shouldn't be there. I might be wrong tho, I'm
| not a native speaker.
| ghaff wrote:
| "This post is comprised of good points" is probably
| technically grammatical but it's an awful sentence. "This
| post made good points" works better. Better still would
| be getting more specific.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| >This post comprises good points. >This post consists of
| good points.
|
| There are items in the set that are good points.
|
| All the items in the set are good points.
| gwd wrote:
| > This post comprises good points.
|
| As a native speaker, I would say:
|
| * Good points comprise this post.
|
| * This post is comprised of good points.
|
| I'm sure there's an interesting historical linguistics
| reason for the way things developed, but "comprised of" is
| well-established usage.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Really? I'd say "this post makes many good points", "is
| comprised of" isn't exactly in common usage these days.
| Izkata wrote:
| Also native speaker: I'd say a closer translation would
| be "this post is based on many good points". Or "founded
| on".
|
| I don't know how universal this is (I don't see anyone
| else making similar points yet..), but I use all three
| phrases because at least in my head they have subtle
| differences:
|
| * "Comprised of" means the pieces make the whole, or at
| least the basis for the whole, and are an important part
| of it.
|
| * "Composed of" drops the "important part of it" from
| "comprised of".
|
| * "Consists of" is even broader, not only including
| "parts that make the whole" but also "a unit that can be
| broken into parts".
|
| The differences aren't always relevant, but meaning is
| lost if they're treated as the same thing.
|
| Edit: Found two further down on this page who each made
| one of my points, but not all three, so at least I'm not
| alone here.
| smcl wrote:
| The post isn't making anything, it's just sitting there
| being read by us. The author, however, made some good
| points in the post.
|
| Additionally the verb _to comprise_ isn 't suitable here
| either, so it's going to sound awkward no matter how you
| try to rearrange the sentence. The "composed of" or
| "consists of" alternatives mentioned in the original page
| aren't really a good fit either.
|
| There's no need to complicate things: this post
| _contains_ many good points.
|
| In truth if someone said or wrote any of these sentences,
| I wouldn't mind whatsoever. I know exactly what they
| meant and that's what matters. However since we're having
| a bit of fun, I figured I'd weigh in :)
| [deleted]
| kcb wrote:
| Don't utilize comprised.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| The (expected) face-value meaning of "comprised of" is usually
| best substituted by "part of": All Gaul comprises three parts
| -> Three parts are comprised of all Gaul.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > All Gaul comprises three parts -> Three parts are comprised
| of all Gaul.
|
| No, that doesn't work.
|
| You could, however, say "Gaul is comprised of three parts".
|
| https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/cw-comprise-
| comprised...
| Xorakios wrote:
| Gaul should be ruled by Rome. There are no three parts.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| No, I know, I'm saying that the _expected_ , compositional,
| interpretation of the phrase (a) exists and (b) is just a
| slightly archaic passive, and it would still be perfectly
| cromulent, just backward.
| jameshart wrote:
| Passive voice is formed with the word 'by' not 'of'.
|
| The verb 'to comprise of' can exist and have a different
| meaning that 'to comprise' or its passive 'to be
| comprised by' - and have a different passive (to be
| comprised of).
|
| Like, the verbs 'smell' and 'smell of' do not mean the
| same thing, nor is one the passive of the other.
|
| - I smell roses - roses are smelled by me - I smell of
| roses - roses are smelled of by me
|
| Four very different meanings.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Thank you for taking a stand against the ever-encroaching
| scourge of "utilize." That one bugs me almost as much as "in
| order to" does. (Just say "to"!)
| leephillips wrote:
| "in order to" and "to" have different shades of meaning, and
| sometimes different meanings entirely (although I guess
| you're right that most instances of the first can be replaced
| by the second).
|
| Think about
|
| "I walk to work."
|
| and
|
| "I walk in order to work."
|
| Close, but not _quite_ the same.
| vajrabum wrote:
| Interesting. If you look at Wiktionary or if you prefer, your
| favorite etymology dictionary, the word utilize is descended
| from Latin from the French word utiliser, via the Italian
| utilizzare which got it from the Latin utilis. All of those
| words mean to use.
|
| I'd be the last person to say you're wrong. Matters of grammar
| and usage ultimately boil down to does it feel right and
| current usage. As is usual with these things, other people have
| different feelings about it. That's what dialect is I think.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >All of those words mean to use.
|
| "The teachers were unable to utilize the new computers" means
| something different from "The teachers were unable to use the
| new computers"
| xdennis wrote:
| Sorry, but what is the difference? "To utilize" is
| literally defined as "to use".
| alasdair_ wrote:
| "utilize" - the teacher wasn't able to _use the computers
| for the intended purpose of teaching_ the children.
|
| "use" - the teacher was unable to _operate_ the computer
| at all (maybe they couldn 't use the mouse, for example).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Nevertheless, "use" is a better word. Using longer words,
| when shorter words are available that mean the same thing,
| comes across as pompous or pretentious.
| ghaff wrote:
| They're not _quite_ the same thing. One example I see
| online is using "utilize" to suggest that something is
| used beyond its intended purpose. (I'm not sure I even
| completely buy that.) But, in general, "use" is shorter and
| sounds less jargony.
| lipoid_ecole wrote:
| Sometimes, the longer word has a connotation that more
| clearly expresses our intention. Sometimes we want
| Hemmingway and other times we want Faulkner.
| Xorakios wrote:
| Harrumph, but you are certainly not the last person to type
| that you are incorrect and it all boils down to the
| dialectic.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| "Dialectic" means something different from "dialect". I
| have no idea which you meant.
| emberfiend wrote:
| Native, high-level speaker here: "comprised of" is not wrong.
| You're entitled to your tastes of course, but you'll have a
| richer understanding of the world if you include the shades in
| your model.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| >> Whenever I come across the word "utilize" in WP, I change it
| to "use"
|
| Thank you so much for this. I do it to. Same with "incentivize"
| -> "incent
|
| _stop the madness!_
| e12e wrote:
| Truly? Webster's lists in part:
|
| > 2: Compose, constitute
|
| > //... a misconception as to what comprises a literary
| generation. -- William Styron
|
| > //... about 8 percent of our military forces are comprised of
| women. -- Jimmy Carter
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Whenever I come across the word "utilize" in WP, I change it
| to "use"_
|
| Not all heroes wear capes. I also chafe at that misuse so I'm
| glad to read of your efforts.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| I feel the same way about s/use/utilize. It's like Joey on
| Friends using a thesaurus.
|
| See also 'Due to the fact' -> 'because'
| ape4 wrote:
| I agree with you "at this point in time" (aka "now")
| kitallis wrote:
| This reminds me of the David Foster Wallace video on "puff
| words" or genteelisms - https://youtu.be/52kiS1oV2k0
| arthurcolle wrote:
| 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.
| jayknight wrote:
| A few years ago I went in a spree of fixing "could of" and
| "should of", but I only did like 50 pages.
| cesaref wrote:
| 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 :)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| A life comprised of pedantry is a life well lived.
| amoss wrote:
| 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.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Language correctness should not be just about usage; ease of
| understanding and aesthetics are also important. "Comprised of"
| arguably fails on both counts.
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