[meteorite-list] Orientated.

[Jonathan Gore]

  [Q] From David Holland: “I am uneasy about the word orientated as in 
business-orientated. I feel the word should be oriented. Am I right, 
wrong, pedantic, or what?”

[A] We have a minor oddity here, in that both orient and orientate come 
from the same French verb, orienter, but were introduced at different 
times, the shorter one in the eighteenth century and the longer in the 
middle of the nineteenth. There’s been a quiet war going on between the 
two of them ever since. I tend to use oriented and orientated pretty 
indiscriminately myself, choosing the shorter one when it seems to fit 
the flow of the sentence. Robert Burchfield, in the Third Edition of 
Fowler’s Modern English Usage, says “one can have no fundamental quarrel 
with anyone who decides to use the longer of the two words”. But all 
this is a British view, since here orientated is common; in the US it is 
less so and considered much less a part of the standard language. So, as 
always, it’s as much a case of who you are writing for and where you are 
doing so.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ori1.htm

McCartney Taylor wrote:
> Hate to bust everyone's bubble, but orientated is a word.  But I don't 
> think you mean to use it. 
> 
> http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=orientated
> 
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