User talk:Giraffedata

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[edit] comprised of

What's wrong with saying "comprised of"?--mrg3105mrg3105 If you're not taking any flack, you're not over the target. 08:25, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

It just isn't English. It's a common mishearing of "composed of" and "comprises." See List of commonly misused English language phrases.
Bryan Henderson (talk) 09:42, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for İYTE article =) Silikonvadisi (talk) 21:54, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Comprised of

I reverted your edit of Town of Carmel Police Department becasue you changed "comprised of" to "has" and you didn't change anything else to make the grammar correct. The sentence read" and is now has", which makes no sense.EMT1871 (talk) 13:02, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
I fixed that one for you... :) MisterSheik (talk) 02:09, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Great work

MisterSheik (talk) 02:09, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Hear, hear!

The Minor Barnstar
For picking the mother of all nits. --Milkbreath (talk) 01:35, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] comprised of

I don't think your comprised of fixes are necessary. The usage is disputed, but the modern trend seems to be that it is acceptable to use "comprised of" to mean "composed of". See List of English words with disputed usage and http://www.bartleby.com/61/72/C0537200.html. Mangostar (talk) 14:20, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd have to agree. Most sources I've looked at indicate that it is becoming standard usage.Mamalujo (talk) 22:17, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I agree more and more people are accepting "comprised of" to mean "composed of." Indeed, more and more people are unaware there's any problem with it. But it's still better to use "to comprise" the traditional way. Bryan Henderson (talk) 05:18, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WRSTC

The usage of "comprised of" in the article WRSTC was taken from the mission statement of the WRSTC. However grammatically incorrect you feel this usage may be, by removing it you significantly alter the meaning of the phrase in the article. Training agencies do not have national or regional councils. I've reverted your "fix". --RexxS (talk) 13:12, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

The fact that it was taken from the mission statement of the WRSTC is not relevant to the question of whether it is grammatically correct or excessively complex.
I didn't notice that there's a parsing of my simplified wording that means the wrong thing. It would be better to use a third wording, then, which is both universally recognized as proper English and can't be misinterpreted. Plenty are available. Maybe I'll do that later on. Bryan Henderson (talk) 21:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
The edit summary was described thus: fix "comprised of". No reference was made to grammar or complexity. The usage of the phrase on the source site says something about acceptability of "comprised of" to mean "consisting of" in modern English and seems relevant enough to be worth noting. The sentence in question contains a main clause and two consecutive sub-clauses, which still doesn't seem over-complex to me.
No amount of parsing can alter the meaning of "national or regional councils of the individual training organizations" to give it the same meaning as "national or regional councils comprised of the individual training organizations". In the former, the genitive "of the individual training organizations" can only refer to "national or regional councils", which is nonsense as the training organisation have no national or regional councils. In the latter, the meaning is clearly that the councils do not belong to training organisations but that the councils draw their membership from training organisations.
However I can see that simplification of the sentence can produce better prose as well as removing the contentious "comprised of". I've now made an attempt to do that. Please feel free to improve the article if you can. --RexxS (talk) 01:02, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
I didn't mean it as a genitive; I meant it as a prepositional phrase. Have you never seen the construction "council of X" to means a council composed of instances of X? Council of elders, council of citizens, etc. It's also used with lots of other words that mean group. That's the parsing I had in mind.
Apart from the fact that many people don't recognize "comprised of" as valid English for any meaning, and can't comfortably read it, in my experience the phrase is often used where it's simply needless aggrandizement of a sentence -- where more pedestrian words such as "is," "have," and "of" make the point more easily. Those are the two problems I try to fix when I edit "comprised of" to something else. Bryan Henderson (talk) 01:22, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Ah, I see where you were going now, although I find it much harder to apply your intended construction when the "council" is qualified and the "X" has the definite article in front of it: "...regional councils of the training agencies...". Maybe my (UK) English usage is subtly different. Anyway, I owe you an apology, as I assumed (quite wrongly) that you'd chopped out the offending word without reading through - mea culpa! Still friends? --RexxS (talk) 23:42, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Comprised of

I am honored by your vigilance to fix these grammatical mistakes, but when the phrase is listed at List of English words with disputed usage, I'm worried that your effort may end up being a loser's folly. By that I mean, even if you fix all the instances of a misusage of "comprised of" in all the articles on Wikipedia, the mere fact that you have to fix tons and tons of articles means that the phrase is becoming more accepted by the majority of people, and really, language is constantly changing, so trying to resist the flow just because the usage was more correct in the past I think is trying too hard. Plus, there will always be more instances of the usage of the phrase, and this will only increase in time as it becomes more accepted. I just think you're putting a lot of time and effort into something that will, in the end, have zero impact on Wikipedia, or the English language, at all.--十八 09:08, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, I would not succeed in reversing this change in the language, and that is not my goal. I will certainly not even erase "comprised of" from Wikipedia. Bryan Henderson (talk) 05:41, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Comprised of

I see this isn't the first time you've gotten nit-picky with other people's language. I reversed your change and refer you to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary for a validation of using "comprised of" as meaning "composed of". It is also present in the Oxford English Dictionary, accessed online as well. --Westheimer19, 3 June 2008.

The dictionary tells us that a substantial number of people write "comprised of" to mean composed of. That's important information, because it means when one reads e.g. a Wikipedia article I haven't edited, one can understand what the author meant. However, the dictionary does not tell us whether "comprised of" is the best wording for any particular sentence. Bryan Henderson (talk) 06:56, 9 June 2008 (UTC)