Sometimes We Don’t Need “Those”

Saying “those” when “the” will do is a pretentiousism. Here’s an example:

Saying “will be the projects that…” is more straightforward than what’s in the quote. In fact, he could have said “…will be projects that…” because, after all, the proper emphasis is on projects, not on their decision-making process (or whatever it is that the word “those” emphasizes).

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“Is comprised of” is one of the worst pretentiousisms out there, and one that bugs me the most. Don’t ever say it!

Here’s the rule:

When you’re talking about a whole thing and its parts, compose goes from the parts to the whole, and comprise goes from the whole to its parts.

Here’s a guy who got it right:

OVER 5,000 YEARS AGO IN what is today Slovakia, a Neolithic community erected a new building. It wasn’t the first “longhouse” in Vráble, an early town comprising about 100 buildings in all. 

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/slovakia-neolithic-rotating-buildings

I mentioned this topic before. For more examples, use the search box in the upper right.

Here’s a picture:

PS—Just ran into another correct usage:

Another example is Isabel de Olvera, a free woman of African descent, who in 1600 went on an expedition to New Spain (a region comprising present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Florida and other parts of North and South America), in search of trade goods and new places to settle. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-slavery/2020/02/07/d4cb0e6a-42e0-11ea-b503-2b077c436617_story.html

I haven’t mentioned this in a while, maybe never: A certain reflexive pronoun is usually a pretentiousism. That word is myself.

Reflexive pronouns are for when you already mentioned the word earlier in the sentence, such as

We did it ourselves.
I baked the cake myself.
You can make your bed yourself.

About the only one people get wrong is “myself.” We don’t say, “Yourself can make the bed.” Here’s an example of how we do it wrong:

Remember Heathkits? The better part of 50 years ago the company had a store here in Maryland, which merited many pilgrimages from myself and my nerdy friends.

http://www.ganssle.com/tem/tem365.html

Sorry, he didn’t mention himself earlier in the sentence, so the sentence should be:

The better part of 50 years ago the company had a store here in Maryland, which merited many pilgrimages from meand my nerdy friends.

Don’t you be pretentious!

Sorry for the pretentiousism—I thought using “virgule” might make the headline more interesting. A virgule is a slash, (also unnecessarily called a forward slash.)

Most of the time when people use a slash, it’s because they don’t want to have to think and actually choose a word, so they use both, separated by a slash. Something like

Ask the manager/owner of the document about its history.

Here’s another example, perhaps a bit more legitimate:

Total pasture/range areas are proportionally divided by animal group based on National Agricultural Statistics Service livestock counts.

In the footnotes of an interesting article about US land use.  https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/?srnd=premium

The first example could replace the slash with “or,” and the second example could use “and” instead of the slash. (By the way, pastures are fenced, and range is not.)

I admit, a slash is shorter than a whole word, and I generally recommend making the shorter choice, other things being equal. But a slash is a lazy person’s way out. Rather like “etc.,” but that’s another story.

General rule: don’t do this.

The lesson is the point of this Gray Matters comic. Adding adding an extra syllable is a pretentiousism, the need to sound classier than you are. Believe me, it defeats the purpose.

Comic writers are generally pretty good with the language, but this Jumpstart has another rather common extra-syllabified (I almost wrote syllableified)  word. I suppose he could use the excuse that he’s writing for the character…

On a related note, I’ve never heard anyone use “idololatry,”