A sole proprietorship is, properly speaking, not a company

Posted on 4 January 2024 in Language

It has recently come to my attention—or, to put it more accurately, I realized—that a sole proprietorship should not, if one picks one’s words carefully, be called a “company”, since the word ‘company’ properly speaking refers to a group of people.

In my writing, I often inaccurately refer to my sole proprietorship as my ‘company’. Given that I am a semanticist and I think using the correct words is important (because words have MEANING; see also Jordan Peterson’s Rule 10: Be precise in your speech), I will now change all these references into something more suitable like ‘business’ or ‘enterprise’, on the site and wiki. Given the size of things, this might take a while. Just so you know.