Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
The justifications given in that essay leave a really bad taste in my mouth:<p>> I believe using "comprised of" is poor writing, because<p>> It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of". It adds nothing to the language.<p>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."<p>> It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.<p>"To comprise" and "to be comprised of" <i>contain</i> the same word, but not in the same sense.<p>> The etymology of the word does not support "comprised of".<p>That's irrelevant to the current meaning of the word. This is called an "etymological fallacy"[1].<p>> 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.<p>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 <i>Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary</i>, <i>Collins English Dictionary</i> and the <i>Oxford Dictionaries</i> regard the form <i>comprised of</i> as standard English usage."[2]<p>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."<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprised_of" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprised_of</a>