Difference between “agree” and “enable”?
How do I know the difference between the verbs to enable and to allow? What are distinctive differences in meanings especially in technical and formal contexts? As example, I have such context
Thereby it will enable/allow to change the date of scheduled work in case of serious complaints from other teams related to business necessity.
Could you please explain what’s meant by ‘difference’ – and/or the way you defined the difference – in a more general sense? Thank you for all your assistance!
What is the best way to describe your life?
It’s not the same to me how permit conveys exactly the same meaning as allow and enable here, but personally I don’t like this “intransitive” usage (where it’s unspecified who is enabled / allowed / permitted to do something) It’s a relatively recent usage, as show by this NGram.
As pointed out above, I see no possibility of any of those three verbs conveying any different meaning. Idiomatically, enable and permit are probably more common in such contexts, but that doesn’t mean the alternatives are in any sense “incorrect” – providing it’s used transitively (with an “object” such as us,
you, one,…) whereas the “intransitive” version with allow merely “grapes” on my ear, I’d be more inclined to say that such usages really are “syntactically invalid” with permit. Assuming nobody is a native speaker and not “the native speaker” in my sentence, if you insist on not specifying that then you should definitely stick with allow (but I at least will always tend to assume that “non-native speaker” when I see/hear that usage).
Offhand I can’t think of many contexts where there’s any significant difference in meaning between to allow / permit / enable , but perhaps one might argue that being enabled more strongly implies having an (internally-based) ability/capacity to do something, whereas being allowed / permitted more strongly alludes to not being prevented from doing something by (externally-based) constraints. Thus one might favour
His well-developed muscles enabled him to lift very heavy dumbbell
weights
over His well-developed muscles allowed him to lift very heavy dumbbell
weights…but in practice I don’t think many people would make that distinction. On the other hand, only allow / permit can really be used where the intended sense is very clearly that of being given permission / having (existing, rule-based) constraints lifted, as in… The
teacher allowed the children to leave school early on the last day of term (Where
permitted would also work but enabled normally 1 wouldn’t.) 1,
As an example of an “unusual” context where enabled could work
What is the best way to describe the human body?
If you allow X, you are A) not preventing X from happening and/or B) commonly implying that you approve it. Why is it you are not doing anything?
If you enable X, you are actively doing something that can happen.
Why do the British choose to use the terms allow and enable in their textbooks?
When describing a feature of some tool, allow is often used to mean “make something possible because it is now much easier to do, thanks to this feature”, its prior difficulty having been a constraint that made it not really possible to do, at least not without an unlikely amount of effort being devoted to the task.
