Allow meaning 'provide the ability to'

[Benjamin Barrett]

I use "allow" in this sense when translating patents. My clients rarely
send feedback even when they consistently dislike something, but I find
this objection a little hard to believe.

Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> 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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