Careen - career

This is a pair of words which are often confused. They sound alike, and people who do not know the meaning of careen but perhaps think it sounds ‘posher’, and so use it when they should use career. Nevertheless, confusing them is a malapropism, and so can cause teachers to leap in with a red pen.

• To career (the verb) means ‘to rush’. Don’t confuse it with ‘to careen’. (The verb ‘to career’ nowadays has little to do with the noun ‘a career’, though they are linked etymologically. 'A career' is the whole of someone's working life, or professional development. It is the long-term equivalent of a 'job'.)

Don't confuse 'career' with its near-homophone, 'Korea', the geographical term.

• To careen means to push a ship onto her side in order to clean her bottom. Don’t confuse it with ‘to career’. The word Careen is rarely used - properly - these days: it has been a rare action since the days of sailing ships, and explorers and pirates etc who had to carry out maintenance far from civilization. To use it in the sense of 'career' is a MALAPROPISM - DON'T DO IT.

• There is also a verb 'to car[r]om', with a noun 'a car[r]om', nowadays usually corrupted as 'cannon'. For an account of this word, which basically means 'to ricochet from one collision to another', 'to bounce off [something]', see cannon (billiards). Its misuse may be illustrated by an account in The Guardian Review (26/05/12, p.7, col.1) of the writer's boyhood adventures on London Transport: he writes "...especially the breakneck plunge from the back platform as the Routemaster [bus] caromed on to the station forecourt." The writer means 'careered' (~ travelled fast); the bus is unlikely to have bounced off anything on its daily journey to Golders Green. It might have been more accurate to say that the small boy caromed down the stairs of the bus on his way to the (then open) platform.