Should sudo be used?
Alex Zbyslaw
xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Fri Apr 6 11:08:07 UTC 2007
Jerry McAllister wrote:
>I noticed one grammatical thing of question. In the first paragraph
>under "Use ssh instead of Telnet or rsh/rlogin" it says
>
> "they should never be used to administrate a machine over a network,"
>
>I think the word should be 'administer' instead of 'administrate'
>unless this is some sort of British thing. I know, picky picky, but
>it just stood out to me as I was reading.
>
>
10 years ago you might have been correct. An old dictionary on the
shelf does not list "administrate". However both modern dictionaries I
tried listed it with the same meaning as administer in it's "oversee" sense.
On-line, try, for example, WordNet http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ (web
interface: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn). I can find over a
dozen references with a google for "administrate meaning".
I can't find any etymology for this specific (and I would agree, in some
sense wrong) form however it is clearly in common usage.
Language evolves, not always in ways that everyone likes. Administer is
a perfectly good word, and there's no need for "administrate" to exist.
But language skills being what they are, someone looks at
"administration" and it's quite understandable how they get to a verb
"administrate". C.f compensation, for example.
--Alex
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list