I've been hearing rumours that "orientated" was making it into the modern lingo. It would seem that my fears are being realized...

Yeah, quite shocking that. The OED's earliest citation for "orientated" is as recent as 1886. Fancy the Reg being that quick to pick up on the Zeitgeist....

Could we have Firefox 2.1 first please?

For me at least, firefox 2 on OSX sucks (I've really come to know and love the "firefox has unexpectedly quit" message).

Sigh, back to 1.5 for me. Not that I'm missing much. What's so in the new firefox that deserves the whole new version number? Seems all that's happened is that the 'close tab' icon has moved and now I can reopen tabs that were previously closed. And it's a lot less stable.

[/rant]

As a developer you wouldn't write a function called:

cancelPlease(...)

when

cancel(...)

would be fine.

Why use 'Orientated' when the perfectly serviceable and shorter, and more correct 'Oriented' exists.

Keep on fighting the good fight! Don't let people use 'leverage' as a verb when 'leverage' is already the noun form of the perfectly serviceable verb 'lever'.

*sigh* been waiting for ages to vent spleen over use of "object-orientated", et al.

Hmm...in response to the rant about Firefox 2 on Mac, I couldn't be happier with it. Haven't had any 'unexpectedly quit' messages at all and I use it all day every day.

For the first poster's benefit, who presumably is from the US (as evinced by a profligate use of letter "z") the UK usage is more commonly "orientated", although either form is used. The etymology of "orientated" is exactly as you might think; it originally meant "to align oneself with or face the East".

For some reason, "occidented" or "occidentated" have never caught on ;-)

"Orientated" is a legitimate word generally used in British English (http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/oriented?view=uk), but then I'm sure the anonymous poster who brought this up can be forgiven for not realiSing that...

It's also been reported that one of the builds which has recently landed on the trunk is actually renders infamous Acid Test 2 correctly:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/acid/

Judging from the spelling of rumour, I would guess that the poster is Canadian, not American.