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From: Geoff Garside <ggarside@spar.ca>
Subject: Re: International Translation Day / Journee internationale de la traduction
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Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 13:33:44 GMT
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With apologies for only general (not specific) nihongo applicability:

gusty@clark.net (Harlan Messinger) wrote:
>K.-Benoit Evans (kevans@panix.com) wrote:
>: Since all of the other words are obviously correct, it occurs to me that 
>: you find fault with the use of "comprised of" to mean "composed of" or 
>: "made up of".
>:    
<<SNIP>>
>: 
>
>"Comprised of" is a pet peeve of mine as well. While I readily accept the
>metamorphoses that occur in language, and do not think that "hopefully" is
>horrible usage, my problem with "comprised of" is that this uses the word 
>to mean the exact opposite of what it originally meant, and it hasn't 
>lost the original meaning yet! 
>
<<SNIP>> (detailed explanation of the objection)

Amen!  Way to go!

To the first poster's sneer of "pedantry", *I* will add:

You usually call someone a pedant when
(a) he's right; you're wrong, and he just made you realise it, or
(b) he's right, because of facts you didn't know, and you resent that, or
(c) he's right, but you're too lazy or slipshod to imitate him, or
(d) he's right, but you can think of no other rejoinder than an ad 
hominem attack.

"Eliminate the pedants, and you eliminate the standards-keepers; you can
then no longer distinguish between success and failure - a goal
vigorously pursued by Western education for over 20 years, and 
evidenced by the sub-literate standard of most of today's written 
material.  I'd love to see arithmetic, or mathematics, developed under
the democratic 'usage' system (if enough people say X, then X by 
definition is proper usage); so we could vote for 2+2=4, 2+2=5, or
2+2=3.99999, etc."

Yoroshiku,
Geoff.



