> 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.
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.
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.”
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.
- fuck -> fuck
- duck -> fuck
Note: I do like ducks but they’re generally less common than fucks.
() 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.
> 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.
Should we accept "break" to mean deceleration, or as a noun for the equipment to slow down a vehicle, then?
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.
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.
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.
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".
Thing is, it's going to happen either way. The actual choices are being "the old man yelling at clouds" vs moving on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eg the French have one, but that doesn't mean they have any moral authority.
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).
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.
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.
At least that used to be the case. In Germany medical students are still required to learn (at least some) Latin.
- 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 Académie, in 1980, was Marguerite Yourcenar, and she probably was the most non-feminist woman they could choose.
- Recently they opposed the “français.e.s” style of writing, sticking to the classic “français(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 Académie 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 Académie Française would be interesting too.
> [..] 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?
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 “français.e.s”?
Firstly, mapping symbols to sound is arbitrary and based on convention.
I don't speak French, but I wouldn't say français.e.s is that much worse than français(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.
I like the idea about Académie, 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.
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.
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.
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 § 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, § 330016(1)(G), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)
Never heard of such, I understand why they get upset if someone sprinkle the sentences with ads.
Get back to me when you can type the traditional ct ligature. ;D
Moralising about caring about style is itself prescriptivism.