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RE: comprise

> > There is no problem using comprised to mean composed of, or made up of. < <

The original definition of comprise meant "wholly inclusive". So when using comprise in a sentence, my understanding is that one needs to list every single item that comprised the whole.

Examples: "Flour, yeast, salt, and water comprise the ingredients for French bread" is correct because every single ingredient was included.

Also, "French bread contains flour" is also correct, as that is just one of the ingredients in French bread. Also "French bread contains salt" is similarly correct.

But when using the original definition of "comprise" is blurred by the substitution of "compose", things start to break down a bit. The test I normally use is to replace "comprise" with "include". It sounds very strange to my ear to say ""included of a few things", while "composed of a few things" is fine and "comprised of a few things" is not.

But the Anquish Languish is very tricky business! For example, it used to be common to say "a couple of" things, and now more and more people say "a couple things". I'm unsure of why we use "of" with "a couple" but not with "a few", as in "I have a few of friends", which sounds completely odd to me, but "I have a couple of friends" sounds totally normal to me...

Another one is that so many words use contractions and sound normal. As far as I know, the sentence "He doesn't know where it's" is grammatically correct, but it sure sounds weird to me!* Many people add a superfluous "at" at the end to make it sound "better", but then it breaks the silly "artificial" rule of not ending sentences with prepositions.

I believe that "rule" came from people who studied Latin centuries ago and it is not possible to end a sentence with a preposition in Latin, so some "educated" people decided that English should follow Latin rules...

I guess I'm just easily confused! :-)

* The Jefferson Airplane used "proper" grammar in their song "Plastic Fantastic Lover" from 1967. The lyric has the line "Baby, you don't know where it is", which follows the "artificial" Latin rule. But to the best of my knowledge, there is not rule against ending a sentence with a contraction, as in "No, he isn't".



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