documentate!!

[Jonathan Lighter]

I've seen "orientate" in Standard English contexts so many times in UK English written by Ph.D.'s that I don't even notice it any more.

JL

FRITZ JUENGLING <juengling_fritz at SALKEIZ.K12.OR.US> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: FRITZ JUENGLING
Subject: Re: documentate!!
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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

>>> 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
>


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