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Bryan Henderson, who goes by Giraffedata, has written a 6,000-word essay on his Wikipedia user page explaining why he thinks "comprised of" is an egregious error. iStock hide caption

Bryan Henderson, who goes by Giraffedata, has written a 6,000-word essay on his Wikipedia user page explaining why he thinks "comprised of" is an egregious error.

I think of English usage as one of those subjects like cocktails or the British royal family. A lot of people take a passing interest in it but you never know who's going to turn out to be a true believer the kind of person who complains about the grammar errors on restaurant menus. "Waiter, there's a split infinitive in my soup!"

For single-minded devotion to grammatical rectitude, you'd be hard-pressed to match a Wikipedia editor named Bryan Henderson, who goes by the user name of Giraffedata. He was the subject of a piece by Andrew McMillan on the long-form site Medium that provoked a lot of debate. Giraffedata has a single bee in his bonnet, the phrase "comprised of." He has written a 6,000-word essay on his Wikipedia user page explaining why he thinks it's an egregious error. And to drive home his point, he has made 47,000 edits over the last eight years, most of them aimed at purging the phrase wherever it occurs on the Wikipedia site. He doesn't show it any mercy even when it appears in a quotation in his view, it's a kindness to writers not to quote their mistakes.

Now if you're like me and don't see anything wrong with the sentence, "The book is comprised of three chapters," you can rest assured that we're in good company. The phrase "comprised of" goes back 300 years. It turns up in Anthony Trollope, in Christopher Hitchens and Norman Mailer, in the essays of Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. Merriam-Webster is OK with it, and so are more than two-thirds of the eminent writers and editors on the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, who aren't generally a very a loosey-goosey crowd.

"It doesn't matter if you consider a word to be correct English. If some sticklers insist that it's an error, the dictionaries and style manuals are going to counsel you to steer clear of it to avoid bringing down their wrath."

But that respectable pedigree hasn't deterred some modern usage commentators who have decided that "comprised of" is illogical. That's the argument Giraffedata has picked up on. As the theory goes, "the book is comprised of three chapters" can't mean the same thing as "the book comprises three chapters." "Comprised of" is a passive form of the verb, they say, which reverses the role of the subject and object. On their view, saying the book is comprised of three chapters is like saying it's "contained of three chapters" or it's "consisted of three chapters." It shouldn't make any sense at all.

If I can get a little down and dweeby myself, I don't find that argument terribly persuasive. Whatever Mrs. Plotkin may have told us in ninth grade, "comprised of" isn't really a passive. It's one of a bunch of curious adjective phrases like "descended from," "avenged of" and "possessed of." "She's possessed of a mischievous spirit" that doesn't mean the spirit possesses her. The English language usually knows what it's doing, even if it doesn't always seem as tidy as we'd like it to be.

But right or wrong, the idea that "comprised of" is illogical has become one of those nuggets of English word-lore that are just obscure enough so that people can take personal ownership of them not pet peeves, exactly, but proprietary ones. It gives you the gratifying feeling of being alert to an error that has escaped the notice of other English speakers since the age when Jonathan Swift was walking the earth.

Well, we all have our little fetishes. What makes Giraffedata remarkable is that he has been able to play out his obsessions on such a wide canvas. He's not just engaging in sporadic acts of resistance, like the people who scratch out misplaced apostrophes on the signs over the vegetable bins at Piggly Wiggly. He's waging total jihad against "comprised of" across 5 million Wikipedia articles and has vowed not to stop until he's driven it into the sea.

Continued here:
Don't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It Out