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Does using "among them" or "including" in a list of items indicate a comprehensive, or partial, list?

English Language & Usage Asked by BJD7980 on July 14, 2021

I’m trying to figure out if using "including" or "among them" in the following sentence suggests that the examples listed are comprehensive, or whether it suggests that the examples given are only a partial accounting.

This is the sentence: "The Foundation allocates $500,000 in combined aid to education charities, among them Charity A and Charity B."

Alternative: "The Foundation allocates $500,000 in combined aid to education charities, including Charity A and Charity B."

Does either sentence suggest that Charity A and Charity B are the only ones jointly getting $500,000 in support from the Foundation? Or does it indicate that the two charities are among a broader cohort of charities that each gets a part of that $500,000 in support (and that the other charities that receive a part of that support just aren’t listed)? Thank you.

One Answer

What it definitely says is that Charity A and Charity B are two of the charities supported.

It might imply that there are more, because it is an explicit two of a group of supported charities, but there may actually be only those two. There is not enough information to come definitively to the conclusion that there are more than two. For this reason, including or among them can be weasel words, leading the reader to think that the largesse is distributed far more widely than it actually is.

Answered by Andrew Leach on July 14, 2021

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