Vocabulary Pet Peeve

[profoundly_grey]

Having had too many run-ins with these two words recently, this needs to be said:

Orientated and conversated sound like someone raking their fingernails down a chalkboard and are not words. It's oriented and conversed!

Get it right!

Comments

[astaraelweeper]

Dear God. Um, yeah. Can we haul these people in for abuse of the English language?

♥

[profoundly_grey]

I wish. ♥

[fadedelegance]

Oh my God, that's annoying! I'm part of the "grammar police", too. You're not alone. That bothers me, too.

[profoundly_grey]

I am not necessarily part of the grammar police, but there are things I just cannot let pass. It just grates on my damn nerves when I hear them, particularly in my communication class (where I hear it most often). Thankfully, I'm not the only one in my class who cringes when it's heard.

[angel_2606]

wow, that's............kinda sad actually, that people say those words the wrong way. *sighs*

[profoundly_grey]

It's not the fact that they say the words wrong, but that they believe them to be correct.

[thephoneix]

You tell them girlfriend. ;)

[profoundly_grey]

♥

[aiseiri_47]

I don't hear conversated much, but so many people use orientated, people like tutors and professionals and I agree, it has that nails-on-chalkboard quality >.<

I also read in a linguistics book a defense of this kind of language misuse -- because language is a communication tool invented by the people who speak it, if the majority of the speakers of a language use the "wrong" word form or meaning, it actually becomes part of the language and people should stop being "purists" about such things (according to the writer's opinion.); basically, it doesn't matter that people use "infer" and "imply" interchangeably even though they have distinctly different (and opposing) meanings, because the meaning is always understood...

So along that line, conversate and orientate would be considered "acceptable" verb forms because so many people use and recognise them and they don't muddle the meaning of the speaker's message, which is the important part

[profoundly_grey]

I agree with you completely.

Currently, orientate is the only acceptable one of the two.