[meteorite-list] Orientated.

From: Jonathan Gore <jonathan301_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Dec 6 00:26:54 2004
Message-ID: <41B3ED91.3000704_at_earthlink.net>

  [Q] From David Holland: ?I am uneasy about the word orientated as in
business-orientated. I feel the word should be oriented. Am I right,
wrong, pedantic, or what??

[A] We have a minor oddity here, in that both orient and orientate come
from the same French verb, orienter, but were introduced at different
times, the shorter one in the eighteenth century and the longer in the
middle of the nineteenth. There?s been a quiet war going on between the
two of them ever since. I tend to use oriented and orientated pretty
indiscriminately myself, choosing the shorter one when it seems to fit
the flow of the sentence. Robert Burchfield, in the Third Edition of
Fowler?s Modern English Usage, says ?one can have no fundamental quarrel
with anyone who decides to use the longer of the two words?. But all
this is a British view, since here orientated is common; in the US it is
less so and considered much less a part of the standard language. So, as
always, it?s as much a case of who you are writing for and where you are
doing so.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ori1.htm

McCartney Taylor wrote:
> Hate to bust everyone's bubble, but orientated is a word. But I don't
> think you mean to use it.
>
> http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=orientated
>
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Received on Mon 06 Dec 2004 12:26:41 AM PST