{"id":1075,"date":"2015-04-28T07:44:16","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T06:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=1075"},"modified":"2015-04-24T17:44:55","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T16:44:55","slug":"what-exactly-are-our-rules-comprised-of-the-economist-23-april-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=1075","title":{"rendered":"What exactly are our rules comprised of? (The Economist 23 April 2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"

MIXED reactions greeted the news in February that a man had edited thousands of Wikipedia articles with a single, special passion. His mission? To remove every instance he could of the phrase \u201ccomprised of\u201d. Bryan Henderson is convinced by a traditional rule about how \u201ccomprise\u201d can be used: \u201cThe parts compose<\/em> the whole, and the whole\u00a0comprises\u00a0<\/em>the parts.\u201d Mr Henderson has made more than 47,000 such changes. Medium.com calls him \u201cthe ultimate WikiGnome\u201d<\/a>. The nickname might imply condescension, but Medium\u2019s profile makes clear that many people applaud him.<\/p>\n

Mr Henderson is not alone in an all-consuming linguistic passion. Bradvines, a commenter on Lingua Franca, the language blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, surfaced last week in the comments on an article<\/a> by Geoff Pullum, a syntactician at the University of Edinburgh. Mr Pullum was writing about whether \u201ca certain closeness\u201d was grammatical. (It is.) But Bradvines ignored the subject at hand. He instead insisted that \u201chad developed\u201d was ungrammatical, as in \u201che had developed a certain closeness.\u201d<\/p>\n

This diverted a dozen or so confused commenters into engaging Bradvines. What on earth is wrong with \u201cHe had developed\u201d? Bradvines insisted that \u201chad\u201d could never go before a \u201cpast-tense verb\u201d, and \u201cdeveloped\u201d is a past-tense verb; therefore \u201chad developed\u201d is not permissible. He was unmoved by repeated statements that this is the classic past perfect (or pluperfect) in English and is perfectly grammatical.<\/p>\n

Someone with the Amazon name Brad Johnston, who seems to be the same person, has reviewed 259 books on Amazon. Nearly all of them are grammar or usage guides. Nearly all of them get one star from Mr Johnston. Nearly all the reviews mention the same fatal flaw: past-perfect forms like \u201chad done\u201d and \u201chad said\u201d. Grammar books by Mr Pullum himself, by Bryan Garner (a lawyer and respected usage-book writer), by Grammar Girl (a popular and admirable grammar populariser) all get the same rap. Mr Johnston even taunts Cambridge University Press for publishing Lindley Murray\u2019s \u201cEnglish Grammar\u201d. \u201cIf the author of this text was born in America, I would be very much interested to hear his\/her defense of ‘had had’, except in the subjunctive. That’s an open invitation. Fire away.\u201d Murray died in 1826.<\/p>\n

Besides his hundeds of reviews, he has denounced the English past perfect across other websites, and Mr Pullum says that he has been e-mailing him for years. In other words, he appears to be a classic monomaniac. Numbers mean nothing to him: just because literally hundreds of grammar books say it is doesn\u2019t make it so. (One of his few Amazon reviews of something other than a book is of set of colourful plastic pails and shovels for children: “I needed the shovel for a very specialized scooping task.” This raises the small but distinct possibility that Mr Johnston is a sophisticated performance artist.)<\/p>\n

What does this have to do with Mr Henderson, who has edited \u201ccomprised of\u201d out of tens of thousands of Wikipedia entries? Many readers see an immediate distinction: Mr Henderson may a bit quixotic, but he his fighting a good fight. Mr Johnston has picked an unwinnable fight with countless authorities on English grammar.<\/p>\n

But the difference between the two men is one of degree, not of kind. Mr Johnston is not convinced by hundreds of usage books, but Mr Henderson is not convinced by tens of thousands of Wikipedia entries. Of course just because something is common doesn\u2019t make it standard English. Some errors are common among inexpert writers but are still clearly errors\u2014things like their <\/em>for they\u2019re. <\/em>But Wikipedia editors are largely people like Mr Henderson: educated native speakers of English who volunteer their time to spread knowledge. Could 47,000 such people all be wrong?<\/p>\n

Consider also that \u201cis comprised of\u201d has been on a steady rise in English books since 1920, and is now about a fifth as common as \u201cis composed of\u201d<\/a>. A list of writers whom Mr Henderson would correct includes<\/a>\u00a0Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Christopher Hitchens, Lionel Trilling and Alfred North Whitehead. \u201cComprised of\u201d appears 1,880 times in the United States Code (the main body of American federal statutes). \u201cFixing\u201d this problem would require Congress to sit day and night for weeks.<\/p>\n

The hopeless quest against the past perfect and the hapless quest against \u201ccomprised of\u201d show that correctness may better be considered a spectrum than a black-and-white affair. A rule’s place on that spectrum is essentially determined by the number of people\u2014and especially the number of experienced writers and editors\u2014who observe it. On one end of the spectrum are rules virtually every speaker of English can agree on: the standard third-person singular of to have <\/em>is has<\/em>, for example. On the other end are rules that almost no one would endorse: Mr Johnston may well be the only person in the world who thinks thathad developed <\/em>is ungrammatical.<\/p>\n

In the middle are countless disputed rules: if \u201ccomprised of\u201d is a stark line, it is an odd one. It divides Mr Henderson, his admirers and sympathetic grammarians (who include Bryan Garner) from Hitchens, Melville and 47,000 Wikipedians. A \u201crule\u201d like that hardly deserves the designation of a \u201crule\u201d\u2014but our black-and-white thinking about language has not given us a more accurate way to describe it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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