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A comment on Wikipedia users edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”. Parent comment

Re:Wikipedia users edits over 90k uses of “comprised of” by denton-scratch on Saturday May 06, 2023 @04:40PM (#35845187)
> 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", althpough 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.

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Re:Wikipedia users edits over 90k uses of “comprised of” by htfu on Sunday May 07, 2023 @12:32PM (#35853124)
Whether or not that is the case, once enough wrong'uns do their thing it becomes correct, correct? Whatever the history or logic or what have you. So it becomes more a question of whether "90k instances on Wikipedia, has made it into dictionaries" is either far too late, or merely a lost cause.
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