Not from The Onion: “Wikipedia grammar vigilante vows to keep fighting against ‘comprised of’ despite ‘resistance’” (iNews).
And from February 2015: “Man’s Wikipedia Edits Mostly Consist of Deleting ‘Comprised Of’” (Gizmodo).
Saturday, December 3, 2016
Still at it
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
comments: 5
I meet these people as I edit Wikipedia.
Annoying? Adorable?
Yes.
Single-minded? Yes. He’s right, of course, but I can think of many ways I’d rather spend time. :)
If he were to peruse Facebook comments on public posts from Americans, he would worry less about "comprised of" and more about why native English speakers can't string together a comprehensible series of words. It's surreal how many are gibberish that can't be parsed. It's not slangy gibberish, which I could parse. Just incomprehensible attempts to communicate.
After seeing your comment, I looked at Bryan Henderson’s user page. He writes that “It’s illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.” Maybe, but contronyms such as cleave, fast, and oversight are part of the language. He commits the so-called etymological fallacy, arguing that an English word’s Latin source prohibits certain meanings for that word. His authorities are almost all Internet-based: no mention of Fowler, Strunk and White, Garner. He’s right about “comprised of,” but he’s hardly a model thinker about English.
"software engineer" explains the mindset.
Post a Comment