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Just lately I find I keep coming across this word in novels. I know it of old: it means to haul a ship over on its side to clean the bottom (preferably without sinking her).
But I find an awful lot of authors (and not at all a lot of awful authors) using it to mean a sort of conflation of "career" and "carom": the balloon careened wildly about the room, or ... careened wildly off the walls.
Something should be done!
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Careen: what it DOESN'T mean!
Just lately I find I keep coming across this word in novels. I know it of old: it means to haul a ship over on its side to clean the bottom (preferably without sinking her). But I find an awful lot of authors (and not at all a lot of awful authors) using it to mean a sort of conflation of "career" and "carom": the balloon careened wildy about the room, or ... careened wildy off the walls.
Something should be done!
The definition of careen is
The definition of careen is to "lurch wildly while in motion". How do the above sentences not make sense?
And let's keep the racist remarks to a minimum, especially if you don't know what you're talking about.
Re: Careen: what it DOESN'T mean!
It's the Americans who are to blame: they're always going on about cars careening off the road on their news programmes. I think someone must have misread a badly written "n" as "r" and it's taken over like a virus. I don't know how far back this happened though.
Far more irritating than that is the "is is" virus (the thing is is...). The origin of this is: "what it is is..." where there is a disguised relative clause, but really thick people have extended it into situations where there isn't one.
I've even heard Jeremy Clarkson saying, "The thing was is..."