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> 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. At least I, as a non

> 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. At least I, as a non-native speaker, find the edited sentences always easier to read. They simply make the text better. As the entire point od Wikipedia is to make knowledge accessible with co-writing, I find it just wild that people would object to better language. So who exactly is imposing their preference on the world: the one making the text easier to read, or the one objecting to the edits?

tysam_and 3y ago
I find this to be a false equivalence. People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland. But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediately true for everyone. Additionally, it's not about a person making text easier to read or not from one (or multiple peoples') perspectives -- this appears to be about someone going on a stylistic crusade en masse. Objecting to the edits being an act of 'imposing their preference on the world' feels similar to the political mirror-projection kind of argument that can happen. I think there is interesting discussion to be had (is it better? are there good ways to use it? when/where/how? what is the ethicality of editing articles like this? is a disclaimer wiki entry enough? etc etc), and maybe we can focus on that.
- deleted 3y ago
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- fatfingerd 3y ago
  I can't see how eliminating a common misuse of an otherwise dead word wouldn't be clearer to nonnative speakers and less painful to the brains of native speakers. There are a lot of people who want to add dead vocabulary back to sound important and they'll succeed often enough with words that are at best unnecessary synonyms that convey no additional information. We don't really have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they do it completely wrong.
  - lal 3y ago
    This conversation has gone back in a circle though. The original parent comment here pointed out that none of the arguments given for why it's a "misuse" hold water. "I can't see how eliminating a common misuse wouldn't be clearer" is not a responsive reply to "it's not a misuse."
    - fatfingerd 3y ago
      I thought the article was clear enough. Comprises with no preposition matches its first and uncontested use. The preposition form is using the second more debatable form to create the first in a way that implies ignorance or wordiness any editor should correct.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". I think that phrase is always incorrect. I suspect the problem is that people aren't used to words that take a list as their direct argument, like "comprise". Wikipedia leans heavily to descriptivism (as do nearly all lexicons, these days). So there's no incorrect usage; there's only usage that jars, for some people. I don't go around telling people they're ignorant because they can't speak their mother-tongue properly. That would simply be rude. But English text intended for publication should be correct English; it shouldn't be garbled, whether because it's written by a non-native speaker, or a native speaker who isn't well-read. That implies that there is such a thing as "correct English". This seems obvious to me, but that's exactly what descriptivists deny. Let's not get into whether "literally" is a synonym for "figuratively".
  - skupig 3y ago
    Correct according to whom? The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings. Precriptivism of a living natural language is hubris. What seems like perfect English to you is not perfect to everyone.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      > 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", although 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.
      - htfu 3y ago
        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.
hhjinks 3y ago
Simplifying the language, so that non-native speakers can understand it, doesn't automatically make the text better. That's a wild assertion. Worse yet, Simple English Wikipedia exists for that exact purpose.
- ttiurani 3y ago
  I agree and that's why I referred to "the edited sentences" and not English in general.
lolinder 3y ago
With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language". I speak fluent Spanish but I wouldn't presume to correct a native Spanish speaker on their style. I also wouldn't base your opinions of what makes for good English on the ramblings of one Wikipedian whose primary argument seems to be that they had to work hard to learn to use the word a particular way and so everyone else should for the rest of time.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language" They said "find the edited sentences always easier to read" and that's valuable regardless if you're a native speaker or not. Of course, what "better language" is as subjective as "clean code" so probably won't reach any consensus there. But all of this is highly subjective in the end, so everyone's opinion is equally worth, native speaker or not.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I was responding to this: > I find it just wild that people would object to better language. They're either saying that their own sense of what is more legible is enough to define what is better, or they're buying into the pedantic arguments in TFA. As to what is easier to read, I think the English Wikipedia should be written to be legible to native English speakers. This is better for everyone: native English speakers can read their Wikipedia, and English learners get exposed to actual English usage rather than a simplified version. In this case, it's not obvious to me that any substantial portion of the English-speaking population sincerely gets confused by "comprised of". It feels much more like the insistence on not ending sentences in prepositions: a rule for the sake of having a rule. EDIT: In fact, "comprised of" recently overtook "comprises" in published books: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+of%22%2C%22comprises%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o...
    - 3y ago

tysam_and 3y ago

I find this to be a false equivalence. People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland. But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediately true for everyone. Additionally, it's not about a person making text easier to read or not from one (or multiple peoples') perspectives -- this appears to be about someone going on a stylistic crusade en masse. Objecting to the edits being an act of 'imposing their preference on the world' feels similar to the political mirror-projection kind of argument that can happen. I think there is interesting discussion to be had (is it better? are there good ways to use it? when/where/how? what is the ethicality of editing articles like this? is a disclaimer wiki entry enough? etc etc), and maybe we can focus on that.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fatfingerd 3y ago
I can't see how eliminating a common misuse of an otherwise dead word wouldn't be clearer to nonnative speakers and less painful to the brains of native speakers. There are a lot of people who want to add dead vocabulary back to sound important and they'll succeed often enough with words that are at best unnecessary synonyms that convey no additional information. We don't really have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they do it completely wrong.
- lal 3y ago
  This conversation has gone back in a circle though. The original parent comment here pointed out that none of the arguments given for why it's a "misuse" hold water. "I can't see how eliminating a common misuse wouldn't be clearer" is not a responsive reply to "it's not a misuse."
  - fatfingerd 3y ago
    I thought the article was clear enough. Comprises with no preposition matches its first and uncontested use. The preposition form is using the second more debatable form to create the first in a way that implies ignorance or wordiness any editor should correct.
denton-scratch 3y ago
> People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". I think that phrase is always incorrect. I suspect the problem is that people aren't used to words that take a list as their direct argument, like "comprise". Wikipedia leans heavily to descriptivism (as do nearly all lexicons, these days). So there's no incorrect usage; there's only usage that jars, for some people. I don't go around telling people they're ignorant because they can't speak their mother-tongue properly. That would simply be rude. But English text intended for publication should be correct English; it shouldn't be garbled, whether because it's written by a non-native speaker, or a native speaker who isn't well-read. That implies that there is such a thing as "correct English". This seems obvious to me, but that's exactly what descriptivists deny. Let's not get into whether "literally" is a synonym for "figuratively".
- skupig 3y ago
  Correct according to whom? The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings. Precriptivism of a living natural language is hubris. What seems like perfect English to you is not perfect to everyone.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > 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", although 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.
    - htfu 3y ago
      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.

hhjinks 3y ago

Simplifying the language, so that non-native speakers can understand it, doesn't automatically make the text better. That's a wild assertion. Worse yet, Simple English Wikipedia exists for that exact purpose.

ttiurani 3y ago
I agree and that's why I referred to "the edited sentences" and not English in general.

lolinder 3y ago

With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language". I speak fluent Spanish but I wouldn't presume to correct a native Spanish speaker on their style. I also wouldn't base your opinions of what makes for good English on the ramblings of one Wikipedian whose primary argument seems to be that they had to work hard to learn to use the word a particular way and so everyone else should for the rest of time.

capableweb 3y ago
> With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language" They said "find the edited sentences always easier to read" and that's valuable regardless if you're a native speaker or not. Of course, what "better language" is as subjective as "clean code" so probably won't reach any consensus there. But all of this is highly subjective in the end, so everyone's opinion is equally worth, native speaker or not.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I was responding to this: > I find it just wild that people would object to better language. They're either saying that their own sense of what is more legible is enough to define what is better, or they're buying into the pedantic arguments in TFA. As to what is easier to read, I think the English Wikipedia should be written to be legible to native English speakers. This is better for everyone: native English speakers can read their Wikipedia, and English learners get exposed to actual English usage rather than a simplified version. In this case, it's not obvious to me that any substantial portion of the English-speaking population sincerely gets confused by "comprised of". It feels much more like the insistence on not ending sentences in prepositions: a rule for the sake of having a rule. EDIT: In fact, "comprised of" recently overtook "comprises" in published books: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+of%22%2C%22comprises%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o...
  - 3y ago