I didn’t have to think about this one. The word that actually is not a word is, orientate. There is no such word. The correct word is orient. As in: “I completed the orienteering merit badge and found the last marker because I learned how to correctly orient the map with the compass.” More commonly, “We new employees had one week of classes to orient us to the corporate culture.”
We don’t orientate anyone for anything! If in Human Resources I would cringe at this usage. Guess my college degree in English had at least this one conceit which now is read as snobbishness.
What do I want? Good grammar or good taste? I want good taste. I loved Marlboro’s much more than Winstons. Being a writer and using my English degree, I loved to smoke and drink black coffee over a hot MacBook Pro. In fact, I would stay on the computer for so long, I’d burn out the logic board so I actually had to use two Pros together on my desk!
I don’t have a problem with using ‘like’ in comparison such as saying, “Winston tastes good such as a cigarette should,” but the reason I don’t like orientate is that is signals to me that the person using it didn’t take an English class, get a degree in Creative Writing, or hasn’t written anything of any length.
As I was writing my first book, I became confounded with traveler and traveling versus traveller and travelling–traveler and traveller are both okay to use, but travelling gets red flagged by spell-check. Another word that freaks me are judgment and judgement–both are correct, but judgment doth win out to a higher level of conceit for those who are professional editors. Drop the e Sinbad.
When I was in the third grade I got corrected on color. I believed innately that the Crayola crayons were wax sticks of colour. Sigh. The teacher did come over to my desk to say the colour was correct for English, but she did mark my paper -1 for my spelling of colour.
The Dao of Doug: A Bus Driver's Perspective 