orientate (was documentate)

[Barnhart]

orientate is indeed old--MW11 (1848).  Earlier hits in
NewspaperArchive.com are misses.

Regards,
David

barnhart at highlands.com


American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on Monday, March 28,
2005 at 1:06 PM -0500 wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: documentate!!
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 9:58 AM -0800 3/28/05, FRITZ JUENGLING wrote:
>>I hear orientate all the time--I think there are a lot of people who
>>do not even know 'orient'.  Maybe they do and avoid it because of
>>the ethnic connotation.
>>Fritz
>
>Isn't "orientate" more or less standard usage in the U.K.?  I seem to
>have heard that claim at some point.
>
>Larry
>
>>
>>>>>  langwidge at EROLS.COM 03/26/05 04:42PM >>>
>>>>From a lurker in Baltimore:
>>
>>Are orientate, documentate, conversate, etc. becoming more common?
>>
>>I hear them used more frequently now than I did several years ago.
>>
>>Or perhaps they're actually words???
>>
>>Christine Gray
>>
>>
>>>   "conversate" for "converse" (v.)
>>
>>Isn't "conversate" slang? Since I was a teenager, this has been used in
>>the sense of "sweet-talk" v.
>>
>>-Wilson Gray
>>
>>>  would be more comparable (20,000 supposed hits by naive Google).
>>>  Anyway, many 'errors' or 'nonstandard variants' (of various types),
>>>  even
>>>  very common ones and even ones which have been in use for a long time,
>>>  are
>>>  excluded from the dictionaries. Any question of whether or not this is
>>>  'good' I'll leave to R. H. Fiske et al.
>>>
>>>  -- Doug Wilson
>>>