TITLE: How do you pronounce the inverse of the $\in$ relation? How do you say $G\ni x$?
QUESTION [19 upvotes]: If I am talking about sets $G$ and $H$ and I want to say in words that $G\subset H$, I, like everyone else, will say that $G$ is contained in $H$, or that $H$ contains $G$.
But if I am talking about a set $G$ and a single point $x$, I get  vaguely uneasy if I say that $x$ "is contained in" $G$ or that $G$ "contains" $x$.  The uneasiness is connected to the idea that it would only be correct to say that $\{x\}$ is contained in $G$, and that it is an abuse of terminology to say the same of $x$ itself.
An alternative is to say that $x$ "is an element of" $G$, which I think is quite standard. But this only avails if I want to mention $x$ first.  Sometimes the prose works better to put $G$ first, and this is where my problem arises.
Since "$G$ contains $x$" makes me uneasy, and "$G$ contains $\{x\}$"  seems circumlocutory, I will often say that "$G$ includes $x$".
Sometimes I will even do this when $x$ comes first, and say that "$x$ is included in $G$" as a synonym for "$x$ is an element of $G$". 
Is this some crazy thing that I made up myself, or is it common usage that I have unconsciously absorbed from the literature? Does everyone else say "$G$ contains $x$" in this case, or do others feel a similar unease about it?
[I should clarify that I'm not only interested in how to say this orally, but also in writing.]

REPLY [5 votes]: It is very ideosyncratic, but a text in which this is completely explicit is Theory of Value by Gerard Debreu, a classic in mathematical economics. I quote:

Corresponding to these two different concepts, two different symbols,
  $\subset$ and $\in$, and two different locutions, "is contained in"
  and "belongs to," are used. Two different verbs are therefore used
  here to read $\supset$ and $\ni$: for the former "contains," and for
  the latter "owns," the natural counterpart of "belongs to."

Needless to say, I have never seen or heared "owns" been used in this way somewhere else.