Regarding the word “oriental” — We do say it in the USA, though it has become far less common because of, believe it or not, political correctness.

Supposedly it is insulting to call a person “oriental” because that word describes things — i.e. a rug is “oriental”, a person is “Asian”.

Kind of absurd in my opinion, but I choose my battles, and “oriental” just isn’t a word worth fighting over; so i say “Asian”.

Now if only homosexuals hadn’t gone and subverted the perfectly nice word “queer” (meaning “strange”) ;-P

It turns out that when the English use quite before a positive term, it actually can mean moderately, instead of very. It can also suggest that I expected the curry to be horrible, but it was it was actually OK, so I was surprised by how good it was. But when quite is modifying a negative term, such as tired, then it does seem to have an enhancing effect.

Even with this explanation I found it hard to believe, so I checked the OED and both meanings are there. Since then, I have done my best to never say it at all, though it is true that Americans seem to feel the need to say it constantly in the UK.

@Ben, I was concerned about finding the right word to describe the impression that U.S. users of orientated, et al. can make on people. Good to know it is the right one by you!

@Peter, do you mean the dictionary.com entry referenced in the post? Or is there yet another one?

@Carmel, thanks for reading. I was under the impression that Oriental was a broad-spectrum description for most East Asian nationalities, but if it’s appearing on identity forms perhaps it isn’t. I’m thinking particularly of the Oriental Studies departments at e.g. Oxford and UCL.

I will certainly give some thought to an entry on quite–I’ve noticed that Americans tend to insert it into their speech a LOT when they’re around the English, and it also shows up unnecessarily in academic papers. Is there any particular instance that particularly grates on you? This would be helpful in preparing an entry.

But I can think of tons of UK examples where a specific example is used to represent a broader category (e.g. curry, pudding, hoover) and I am sure we have tons in American English that I just don’t notice due to familiarity.

Can you do a blog entry on quite? It is my absolute nemesis.

However, just when I began to feel smug, I found an entry in dictionary.com that somewhat weakened this commentation’s argument.

As for my personal preferences, I really do think that orientated/disorientated sound silly, and yes, ignorant. I just had no idea that my fellow Americans felt the same way.

also, are single quotations marks a british thing? i always use them instead of double quotations marks because the double marks offend me.

no really.

they do.