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Bryan Henderson’s hobby is eliminating comprised of from Wikipedia articles. Just another quixotic purist struggling to retard linguistic evolution? That’s what people seemed to think I’d say, as they busied themselves sending me links to Andrew McMillen’s Backchannel article about Henderson. But the situation is subtle, and head-swirlingly complex. I’ll explain as clearly as I can. Comprise yourself—I mean compose yourself.
A 20th-century prescriptive tradition insists that comprise and compose are antonyms looking at the part-whole relation from diametrically opposed standpoints.
Compose takes the bottom-up view. It means “constitute” or “make up.” The parts compose the whole, the tradition claims. (This use of compose is actually not very common, and a sentence like Copper and zinc compose brass sounds thoroughly unidiomatic.)
Comprise, in what I will call its original sense, looks top-down instead. It means “consist of” or “embrace” or “include.” The whole comprises the parts; brass comprises copper and zinc.
Unfortunately, for centuries the verb comprise has also been used to mean compose. I’ll call this the inverted sense. It’s well-established among respectable writers, from the late 18th century on. This Language Log post by Mark Liberman cites examples from Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 20th-century quotations, and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage supplies more, including an occurrence in a letter by Jane Austen (“Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family”; October 14, 1813)..
Treatments of this topic nearly always mistakenly speak of is composed of and is comprised of as passives. They aren’t. Compose in its musical/literary sense does have a passive (The Moonlight Sonata was composed by Beethoven), but the part/whole sense doesn’t. Nobody says *Brass is composed by copper and zinc. Instead we get Brass is composed of copper and zinc–and there is no understood by-phrase. Here composed is an adjective, requiring (like afraid, fond, proud, etc.) an of-phrase complement.
The grain of truth in the error is that is composed of expresses the inverse of composes, hence has the original sense of comprises; so Brass is composed of copper and zinc is synonymous with Brass comprises copper and zinc.
Now things get even uglier. Comprised is also an adjective, not a passive verb, and takes an of-phrase like compose. Comprised of expresses the inverse of the inverted sense of comprise, which means it expresses the inverse of compose, so it means composed of, which is (roughly) the original meaning of comprise. So when Ashley Montagu writes “It was universally believed that mankind was comprised of a single species” (in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 1942), I think he means people believed that a single species comprised all of mankind.
Bryan Henderson wants to eliminate all comprised of locutions from Wikipedia. He has a tough row to hoe. This recent Language Log post by Mark Liberman points out that Thomas Hardy used comprised of, and cites examples from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, etc. Liberman also notes that there are thousands of occurrences in the U.S. legal code (modifiable only by Congress), and court decisions contribute hundreds of thousands more.
The inverted senses of comprise and comprised of do seem to have been born in error. Specifically, they originate in a malapropism: picking the wrong word because of a false belief about its meaning. “I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning,” said Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals, confusing progeny with prodigy. Around 350 years ago someone reaching in their mental lexicon for compose fetched up comprise instead.
Nonetheless, calling the inverted sense an ignorant error today would be overreaching. Though still less frequent than the original sense, it is far too well-entrenched to be dismissed.
Henderson’s essay defending his project claims comprised of is (i) unnecessary, (ii) illogical, (iii) unetymological, (iv) novel, (v) imprecise, and often (vi) vacuous (as when people write a team comprised of scientists instead of a team of scientists). But David Shariatmadari’s counterarguments (in this Guardian article) are basically sound. Those who seek parsimony, logic, precision, or etymological fidelity or in the lexicon of a human language are cruising for a bruising.
Shariatmadari is repulsed by the idea of Wikipedia adopting Henderson’s policy. I am more sympathetic. I’d happily comply with an edict limiting comprise to its original sense. (Notice, no restriction is needed for compose : People never use compose to mean “embrace” or “consist of.” This isn’t about a confusion between two words; it’s about one word picking up an additional meaning stolen from another word nearby.)
I see no reason to favor the inverted sense. There’s nothing virtuous about the ambiguity and auto-antonymy it promotes. It’s easier than you’d think for unclarity to arise about whether an author is saying some abstract X makes up Y or that it consists of Y. (Look again at the Jane Austen example quoted above: are you sure she didn’t intend the original sense of comprise ? I’m not.) So I’d be happy for Bryan Henderson’s clarifying mission to succeed.
However, I wouldn’t bet a dime on his success. He has changed nearly 50,000 occurrences of comprised of already. New ones appear every week. He seems undaunted by his Sisyphean task, but I fear it will outlive him.