Grammar girl here, you get a bonus show this week because I want to beg you again to

help fund my card game P-Wars, which you can find at fundanything.com slash P-Wars.

And I don't like to ask for something without giving you something in return.

How's that for transparency?

Today, we're going to talk about two cases where English has two words that mean the

same thing, and whether one choice is better than the other, preventative and preventive,

and orient, and orientate.

First we'll do preventive and preventative.

In my book The Grammar Devotional, I wrote that it's okay to use preventative, but I got

this email message from a reader named Carissa, quote,

The word preventive is one of my biggest pet peeves, and it's always been my firm belief

that preventative is simply incorrect.

So you can imagine my dismay when I read in the grammar devotional that preventative

is in fact an acceptable variation of preventive.

I then came across this from the heart predictionary of contemporary usage, unquote, and she goes

on to quote a section of that book that essentially says preventative is horrible and you should

never use it, and asks me to go into more detail because now she's confused.

Often when there are two nearly identical words that mean the same thing, such as preventive

and preventative, everyone presumes that one of them is wrong, usually the longer one.

That kind of logic would suggest that preventative is a bad word.

I remember agonizing over this entry for The Grammar Devotional because my most trusted

source, Garner's Modern American Usage, calls preventative, unfortunate, and unnecessary.

...