Re:Wikipedia users edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
by bee_rider on Saturday May 06, 2023 @12:37PM
(#35842954)
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.
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.