To criticize someone else's usage, get yours right

Today's really the day for the Durham newsroom of the News & Observer. A third blog item, from the education beat reporter, gets all snotty about the local school system using a tricky word wrong, arguably. However, the post, School policy uses poor grammar, is itself wrong out of the gate by using the word grammar to gripe about a usage error.

Here's my post in reply:
The error in the item you are so distressed about is not of grammar but of usage - and by calling it grammar you have committed an equal error of usage.

See Lingua ex Machina, from MIT Press:

grammar Not to be confused with socially correct usage. In order to handle novel sentences, we not only need to access the words stored in our brains but also the patterns of sentences possible in a particular language. These patterns describe not just patterns of words but also patterns of patterns. There are three aspects of grammar: morphology (word forms and endings), syntax (from the Greek "to arrange together" – the ordering of words into clauses and sentences), and phonology (speech sounds and their arrangements). A complete collection of rules is called the mental grammar of the language, or grammar for short.

The Maven's Word of the Day from Random House suggests doing what I do - avoiding the word altogether - at the same time it quotes no less literate an author than Saul Bellow as using it the "wrong" way that upsets you so badly.

"Put together the slaughterhouses, the steel mills, the freight yards...that comprised the city" (Saul Bellow).

The American Heritage Dictionary allows that:

Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected.

So I would suggest you unknot your panties and pay attention to something really important.