Orientated

I almost forgot about this one given to me by my friend Michael. I don't know the person who actually used the word or the exact context, but he told me about it and we all laughed. As I was writing about orientated I realized it isn't coming up on my spell check as being incorrect like all of Rick's blaring mistakes, so I looked it up and here is what I found....


"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 orientedand 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."
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ori1.htm

I also looked for anything showing a contrary opinion, and didn't find it... to my surprise orientated and oriented is like tomato and tomahto (although they are spelled the same it doesn't have the effect it does orally, so I tossed in the H), fetamorcially speaking... well technically similiely speaking... hahaha! I guess it's depends on your preference; hearing orientated still makes me kind of laugh because I think it sounds silly.