I had a comment, a while back, on this post about “comprised of.” The correspondent wrote that, contrary to my conclusion, “comprised of” is acceptable in the UK. I know these things differ, so I had a look around.

This Wikipedian, who seems to have a mission, explored the issue deeply and came up with the result that, no “comprised of” is not acceptable grammar, not in North America, the UK, or anywhere else.
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Answer: a. or b.

Explanation:
In a computing context, software and program are mostly synonymous. Software can be made up of more than one program, however, and if you’re talking about a product, it’s usually called software.

An operating system is like the software administrator of the computer, managing interactions between hardware and applications. It’s one type of system software, which is the software that the system uses — the user doesn’t interact with it directly.

An application (the short form of application program) is software that performs a specific function directly for the user or, in some cases, for another application program.

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Answer: a.

Explanation:
Mice is the clear winner in a Google poll:
Computer mice: 319,000
Computer mouses: 30,600
(But that’s not why we say it’s correct.)

There’s a lot of discussion about this issue online and, although consensus seems to be for mice, some folks insist that mouses is more correct or even mouse, like the plural of moose (which is moose). Here’s a sample argument:

MOUSE is an acronym, and is short for Manually-Operated User-Selection Equipment so technically MOUSE is already the plural (… Equipments?) Most people, however pluralise acronyms, and initials in general, by adding a small s, so it would be MOUSEs, which seems a bit silly. Mice is also wrong, as it doesn’t stand for anything, but it does make more grammatical sense than calling them MOUSE or MOUSEs. (NB: If a MOUSE was so called because it looked like the animal, then mice would be correct, but that isn’t the case, although small body, long tail, who knows…)

We’re not sure about that acronym story. It seems to us more likely a backronym, made up with likely words to stand for the letters in the name. Because, after all, everything should be an acronym, right? (OT: Did you know there’s a sarcasm mark? Maybe I’ll go see if I can’t round one up.)

The OED lists the plural as mouses. Much as we hate to disagree with the OED, we will do so in this case.

Why do we say with such certainty that the plural of (computer) mouse is mice? We went to the source. In this video, at about 10:03, Douglas Engelbart, who invented the mouse, refers to it in the plural as mice. Oh, and by the way? He said the name was chosen for the device’s resemblance to its furry namesake — yes, small body, the long tail.Maybe the tendency to scamper…

So there you have the authorative answer: Douglas Englebart says the plural of mouse is mice. So it would just be silly for us to say it should be something else. Especially mouses.

Thanks to @OnewordTF for the idea!

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Answer: Either.

Explanation:
If something is valuable, it’s worth a lot — generally quantified in dollars. If something is invaluable it’s worth such a lot that we can’t assign a dollar figure to it. Something can be both valuable and invaluable, of course. But if we’re trying to say that something is priceless, invaluable will get our meaning across. (Priceless is another funny one — it looks like it should mean free, but it really means so valuable that a price cannot be attached — invaluable.)

As some people point out, these two words seem like they should mean the opposite of each other. However, we need to think of the valuable part of invaluable a little differently. Think of it as value-able, meaning “can have value assessed,” like “quantifiable” means “can have quantity assessed.” Invaluable, then, refers to something to which a specific value cannot be attached. Because we can hardly begin to imagine how high that value might be.

And that’s the word that critics of health information sharing systems to describe their value to health insurance companies.

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