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> 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
by denton-scratch 4y 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 4y agoCorrect 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 4y 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 4y agoWhether 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.