A Word, Please: An editor’s single-minded effort to correct a pet peeve

Did you hear the one about the guy who went onto Wikipedia and deleted 47,000 instances of the phrase “comprised of”?

Oh, dear. I hope you’re not waiting for a punch line, because that’s the whole story: A guy went onto Wikipedia and deleted 47,000 “comprised ofs,” replacing each with “composed of” or some other alternative. It’s one of those stories in which the setup is the punch line. There’s just nothing funnier that you could add.

The guy is 51-year-old software engineer Bryan Henderson, one of countless thousands of people who take it upon themselves to click the “edit” button on entries in the online free-for-all — in both senses of the term — encyclopedia.

Henderson began scrubbing Wikipedia of “comprised of” in 2007, using a program he wrote to find the phrase, yet fixing each instance manually.

That’s his sole mission. Henderson doesn’t bother with other errors, really. Just “comprised of.” And before you leap to any of the obvious criticisms, you might want to read the 6,000-word entry Henderson created to explain his crusade — a screed in which he’s already blasted pretty much any response you or I might have.

Want to argue with him that “comprised of” isn’t technically an error? He’s way ahead of you, using carefully chosen language to describe the problem as “poor phrasing” and the like.

Want to argue that his efforts are pointless? You’d have a point. Throughout history, pretty much every attempt to force change upon the English language has failed. But to Henderson that’s moot.

“The arguments for leaving ‘comprised of’ alone often point out that my edits will not erase the phrase from the language, make people stop using it, or prevent its eventual evolution into undisputed correct English,” Henderson wrote. “I agree with all of that, and I don’t see how it makes a difference. Those things have never been goals of mine.”

Want to argue that he’s wasting his time? Another good point. But again, he’s way ahead of you. “An individual editor’s allocation of his time shouldn’t be anyone else’s concern.”

So all we can do is shrug and be grateful we have friends, TVs and stimulating hobbies like leaving Wikipedia entries just as they are. That and maybe turn the whole situation into an opportunity to learn about “compose” and “comprise.”

In their primary definitions, “comprise” means to contain or include, while “compose” means to make or make up something. So our country comprises 50 states and those states compose the country. If that last part sounds a little odd it’s because “compose” is often used in the passive: The country is composed of 50 states.

See where the confusion comes in? In their most proper forms, “compose” and “comprise” are both used in sentences in which the whole (the country) as opposed to the parts (the states) is the grammatical subject: The country comprises. The country is composed of. It’s not a huge leap to combine the two: The country is comprised of.

In professional editing, that’s an error. Bad form. But in everyday usage, it’s correct and defensible. Look up “comprise” in a couple of dictionaries and you’ll see it can be a synonym of “compose.” Merriam-Webster’s even cites the following as an example of how it’s used: “About 8% of our military forces are comprised of women.”

So if you think Henderson’s quest is a little crazy, I’m with you. Although, in my more candid moments, I’ll confess I can relate. I too have wanted to wipe my own usage peeve from the online world: periods and commas after quotation marks, as when you’re discussing a word, say “apple,” and you put the comma after that closing quote mark instead of before it.

It almost makes me want to contact Henderson to ask him to turn his attentions and algorithms to this insufferable punctuation form, which in American English is in fact an error. Unfortunately, he’s one of the people who does it.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies.” She can be reached at [email protected].