Allow meaning 'provide the ability to'

[Jonathan Lighter]

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary has it: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=2229&dict=CALD

  but many others do not.  Your sentence sounds unremarkable to me, though if it occurred to me to think about it I might have replaced "allow" with "enable" simply because the latter is a little more precise. Or something.

  But I'm quite surprised that the dictionaries you mention overlook this nuance.  I doubt that your colleague's objection is a "shibboleth," which implies that a great many people have heard of it and observe it.  Any objection on principle to your usage is news to me.

  JL

  Geoff Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Geoff Nathan
Subject: Allow meaning 'provide the ability to'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm having a small debate with a local prescriptivist over something I'm
writing to advertise an upcoming conference on e-Portfolios. I had written:

> E-Portfolios are a relatively new electronic tool allowing students to
> >assemble an online summary of their academic careers (papers, films,
> >performances, poems, foreign language abilities).
and was told 'allow' means 'permit'. My usage struck me as totally
unremarkable, so I went to the OED, Dictionary.com and MerriamWebster
Online, and found, to my astonishment, that none agreed with me,
providing no senses like the one I used here. Am I missing something?
Have I run across a new shibboleth? Or new to me?
I can easily construct a plausible story for the semantics of the
extension, but I'm surprised it hasn't made it to dictionaries. Or is
this slightly metaphorical use so common as not to need explication?

--
Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of English/Computing and Information Technology
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI, 48202

Phones: C&IT (313) 577-1259/English (313) 577-8621

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