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The patron saint of community-minded pedants must be Alexander Cruden. He had compiled a concordance to the Bible, listing each word alphabetically and arranging homonyms in clumps according to meaning. In the 18th century, the one in which he lived, this was a laborious task. I am not convinced that those labours alone deranged his mind, but it is likely that work on the concordance and hack-work as a proofreader (or corrector of the press as the phrase was at the time) influenced the expression of his madness.

He took to referring to himself as Alexander the Corrector. A mob whipped up by John Wilkes rampaged through London chalking on front doors the nuber 45 (the issue number of the North Briton for which Wilkes was prosecuted for seditious libel). Cruden ran behind them with a sponge, rubbing it off again.

He went further. Disliking, as some people do, profane swearing, Cruden, then in his fifties, was annoyed by a young man in the street, leaning on a shovel, who swore as he passed. By his own account, Cruden took his shovel and corrected him with some severity. As a consequence he was detained for 17 days in Peter Inskips private lunatic asylum at Chelsea (one of many such establishments).

Poor Cruden. Having begun as a corrector of misprints he had set his sights on correcting the morals of the realm but ended up classified by a defiant world as mistaken himself not quite right in the head, as theyd say a walking error to be laughed out of consideration.

By comparison, Mr Henderson, the Comprised Crusader, has suffered little for his cause. Yet even he was taken aback by the unenlightened. You jerk, its a matter of opinion! came one response to his Wikipedia corrections. Its completely valid, I looked it up in my dictionary! You have no right to mess with my article!

Mr Henderson knows that not everyone agrees with him. So he has constructed a syllogism to prove his point. Composed of and consists of are good alternatives to comprised of. But no one finds comprised of better than the alternatives. Therefore everyone should stop using it.

Fowler, that bible of modern English usage, even in its updated edition judiciously revised by the great Robert Burchfield, agrees, up to a point. The sheer frequency, of a related construction such as the four submarines comprising the nuclear deterrent, he wrote 20 years ago, seems likely to take it out of the disputed area before long.

Language changes, and at this rate Mr Henderson will soon be such an odd man out as to be wrong. But, like so many words, wrong is ambiguous. It means wicked as well as incorrect. Cruden may have been mad, but he was on to something. It is the work of the satirist to mock human follies, just as grammarians laugh at catachresis. Grammarians are martyred under the name of pedant; satirists are called seditious (or politically incorrect). Theirs is the higher calling, and the deadlier risk.

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Pedants of the world, we salute you