documentate!!

[Roger Shuy]

on 3/28/05 12:06 PM, Laurence Horn at laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 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
>>>
>
I just got back the copy edited version of a book I'm writing in which the
copyeditor decided that my use of "in a solicitation to murder case" should
be changed into a verbal expression, "to solicitate a murder." Obviously I'm
objecitating to this monstrous change. But maybe that's they way the -ate
movement is going these days.

Roger Shuy