I think this is a good sentence:
(1) “The right side of the plane was badly burned in a fire after the plane careened through a field […] like a four-wheeling Jeep.”
To hear a prescriptivist tell it, though, this is an awful sentence, symptomatic of an American carelessness for the meaning of words. In fact, let’s let a prescriptivist tell it. I quote here from James Cochrane’s vituperative volume Between You and I, page 23:
“Users of this expression may be surprised to discover that the original meaning of to careen is to turn a vessel over on its side […] What they presumably mean to convey is the idea of something rushing headlong down a street on a dangerously erratic course. […] In American English, careen is certainly a Lost Cause, since its use in this erroneous sense is recognised in dictionaries, but for British English it may not be too late to rescue it.”
Cochrane is right, though unbearably pretentious, in his claim that the first meaning of careen was to turn a ship onto its side, usually in order to clean off the barnacles and other sea-junk. This sense is attested all the way back to 1600 in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it continues to be used to the present day, albeit sparingly and primarily by seafarers.
But Cochrane stops short of the whole story. Careen has a second meaning that is just as uncontroversial as its original meaning: to lean, heel over, list, or tilt. Thus we get the following usages:
(2a) In Worcester a charming reminiscence hangs about the sloping heights of Asnebumskit, whose great hill-sides, which the Senator has bequeathed in trust to his two grandchildren, careen toward the city. [1909]
(2b) The ship staggered, careened, and reeled, as wave after wave came thundering on her. [1863, cited in the OED]
It’s still occasionally used with this meaning today, at least in nautically-themed historical romance novels. But Cochrane makes no mention of it, and therefore, to use a nautical idiom, he’s selling us a bill of goods. He’s smugly saying that we are — as he puts it in the Preface to the 2nd Edition of the book — “half-educatedly” using careen, and yet he is only half-educatedly explaining the history of careen. You can almost see why he’d be irritated by people taking such a huge semantic leap with a word, moving straight from “turning on a side to clean” to “rushing unsteadily”, if that were the case. But it wasn’t. There were two reasonable semantic jumps, first from “turning on one side” to “tilting from side to side” (2b), and only from there to “moving quickly and unsteadily/uncontrolledly”.
But tons of words no longer mean what they once meant. (I wrote a few months ago about the curious history of awful and awesome, for instance.) So why does careen draw prescriptivists’ ire in a way that most other words whose meanings have changed do not? The answer is a single word: career. Prescriptivists are convinced that when we say careen, we really mean career. After all, the OED tells us that career means “to gallop, run, or move at full speed”. And that is very close to what we intend with careen. Very close indeed… and yet, not close enough.
The verb career apparently comes from a Latin root related to racing. The early uses of the word in the OED are about just this: the careerers are horses hurtling down the track fast as they can. Now, I am not an equestrian myself, but I generally think of horses as graceful creatures. For instance, I have watched two consecutive runnings of the Kentucky Derby, and the horses ran beautifully, steadily, and speedily both times. In neither case would I be willing to say that the horses careened down the track. On the other hand, I have also had a few opportunities to watch toddlers race. They most assuredly careen. They do not career. Perhaps this is strictly my own usage, but I think of careering as “moving swiftly and effectively”, and careening as “moving fast and uncontrolledly”. For me, the two have very closely related, but distinct, meanings. And this is why I continue to use careen.
I feel that this is the appropriate time to point out a line from Between You and I‘s Preface, where Cochrane is spelling out the purpose of his book:
“It is not written from any inclination to be purist in the sense of proposing that change is to be resisted at all costs; on the contrary, not only is change inevitable but the constant renewal and enlargement of our wonderful language is generally to be welcomed rather than not.”
You are welcome to draw your own conclusions about whether Cochrane had recently read his book when he wrote that preface.
Summary: Prescriptivists claim it’s wrong to use careening to mean “moving quickly and unsteadily”, because careening actually means “turning a boat on its side” and the intended meaning can be gotten from the obscure verb career. However, career does not mean the same as careen, and a series of simple semantic extensions can explain why careen has taken on its unsteady-motion meaning.
Motivated Grammar 
17 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 2, 2009 at 7:01 am
arnoldzwicky
Nice entry in MWDEU on “careen, career” and its history in the advice literature. It does note that the extended sense of “careen” seems to be an Americanism.
October 26, 2009 at 5:39 pm
John Taylor
In fact your quote about the definition of career is incorrect.
You intend careen to mean and I quote – “moving fast and uncontrolledly” and say career in the OED means “to gallop, run, or move at full speed.” You therefore conclude that careen is not a mis-pronunciation of career.
In fact the definition of career from the OED is “move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.”
Here is the link http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/career?view=uk
It just doesn’t make sense that the average American in the street suddenly started using a nautical term to refer to car movement. Given that what people mean when they say careen is defined precisely by career, it seems clear when people say careen they mean career. Careen seems to be simply the perpetuation of an uneducated mispronunciation of career.
October 26, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Vance
John, do I understand right that you’re arguing
1. The words mean the same (contra Gabe)
2. Therefore they can’t be distinct words
3. Therefore one (chosen seemingly by lot) is the real word, and the other is a mispronunciation of the other
?
October 26, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Vance
(whoops, should have read “the other is a mispronunciation of the real one”)
October 28, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Gabe
John: My quote isn’t incorrect; it seems we’re using different versions of the OED. The AskOxford link you provided is to the Compact OED, whereas I was using the online Second Edition (http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50033429?query_type=word&queryword=career&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=2&search_id=nAKn-Ul5NPy-10741&hilite=50033429).
You’re entirely correct that the Compact OED’s definition of career is essentially the same as that of careen, but this doesn’t mean that careen is necessarily a corruption of career. It could just as well be that the meanings of careen and career are trending toward each other over time, since they are often both equally true of a movement type. A similar thing happened with genuine and authentic, which are defined identically in most people’s speech, although originally there was a subtle difference between the two (and may still be).
November 11, 2009 at 2:30 am
mark
Interesting that the professor lectures us on the meaning of ‘careen,’ whilst disqualifying himself from doing so with his absurdly mis-judged definition of ‘career’.
‘Careen’s’ sideways move from near-homonym to near-synomym is surely a result of its being used metaphorically. But its official recognition as a synonym leaves us another definition poorer, another step nearer Wonderland.
I say ‘interesting’ – perhaps the professor might not find it so; he would probably, on the evidence above, pronounce himself disinterested.
Brave new world, indeed.
Mark Revelle
November 11, 2009 at 11:48 am
Gabe
mark: Ah, but there’s a huge difference between saying that a word can also have a very similar meaning to its original one and declaring that any word anywhere can mean anything. That’s been happening forever in English and other languages; see the “awful” & “awesome” example above or the “genuine” & “authentic” example in Jan Freeman’s “Write It Right”. My point is merely that these sorts of fairly regular changes are nothing new; they’re not contributing to the downfall of English because they are the very forces that built English into what it is today.
Also, I don’t know who you mean by “the professor”. I’m a graduate student and Cochrane, well, I’m not quite sure what he is. (Is “angry” an occupation?) If you mean me, I think it’s more than a slight overstatement to call using the definition in the OED instead of that of the Compact OED an absurd misjudgment.
November 11, 2009 at 4:28 pm
mark
Gabe, if it was you:
a) I was using your own definition of to career, ascribed to you by you yourself, not any dictionary definition. And your definition is nonsense.
b) You cannot justify the damage caused to language by claiming it is an effect of the very forces which are creating that language. Of course our language is growing and developing. But we are also losing very useful and elegant distinctions on the way, and that is indefensible, if inevitable.
August 4, 2012 at 7:26 am
Denis Mollison
A few more historical examples would be helpful!
Career: I don’t think it fair to call the use of this as a verb “obscure”. I’ve come across it quite a few times in english literature over the years, and always as far as I can recall implying hurrying in an uncontrolled manner.
Careen: until recently, I had only come across as in reference to ships tilting, whether for cleaning or otherwise.
The reference quoted here of 1863 doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than “tilted” – otherwise the accompanying adjectives “staggered” and “reeled” would be redundant.
So, I shall continue to think of the use of “careen” to mean “hurry uncontrolledly” as a relatively recent usage arising from confusion with the established “career” until historical evidence otherwise is presented.
[I unfortunately don’t have a subscription to the full Oxford OED so can’t see what examples it gives.]
December 9, 2012 at 10:28 am
Careen vs. career - Grammarist
[…] “Career vs. “careen” at Grammarphobia The meaning of “careening” at Motivated Grammar […]
June 14, 2013 at 7:33 pm
John Cowan
Well, it certainly is recent, but so are a great many things, and none the worse for that.
July 20, 2018 at 8:58 am
Paul Knox
The two examples cited by the OP in defence of “careen” signifying forward motion, like “career,” show nothing of the kind. One is metaphorical, alluding to the slanting cast of stationary hills. The other is one of three word describing an imperilled ship, said to have “staggered, careened, and reeled.” The first and last of these words signify forwardor backward motion. The middle one, “careened,” doesn’t; as another commenter said, if it did the other two words would be redundant. The writer is describing a ship battered by waves. Its forward motion becomes erratic (staggered), it tips over on its side (careened), then it is thrown back or around in circles, out of control (reeled). The sense of “careen as tipping on its side is preserved in both examples. Common usage aside, there’s no reason why a writer shouldn’t choose to restrict their use of “careen” to this meaning, and use “career” to signify reckless forward motion. Especially in this time of short attention spans, one should diminish the possibility of ambiguity wherever possible.
July 20, 2018 at 10:26 am
denismollison
Thanks, Paul. I’m still mystified at the attack in the original article on James Cochrane (`vituperative’, `smugly’), and indeed on `prescriptivism’, which seems to be being used as a pejorative word for what I would call `getting meanings right’.
July 10, 2019 at 10:49 am
Dmroberts
The American eye, it does seem, is habituated or predisposed to regard the word “career” as a noun to be reserved exclusively for one’s professional curriculum vitae and is bewildered by the demand to use it as the verb denoting headlong forward movement. Such a demand, based as it is not on a wish to dictate de haut en bas but on an appeal to preserve distinctions among words and things and on a respect for precision of usage, strikes the ear of a speaker of American English – who has no time literally and figuratively for such lordly imperatives, – as insufferably fuddy-duddy or just plain undemocratic nonsense. Another verb, it is intuitively and strongly felt, is needed to describe the action. This feeling is consistent with a reductive, simplifying impulse in American English that has no truck or patience with finer points of grammar nor any time for distinctions imported from the old world. The cognate tendency to pronounce words as read on the page – e. g., “buoy” as boo-ey not as “boy,” or ” quay” as ” kai” not “key” may serve, however obliquely, as one of very many example.
Hence the institutionalization of “careen” : the result in part of impatience, in part of sloth, in part of ignorance associated with the indifferent quality of mass education in the United States. Its universal acceptance there does not render null any of these culturally and historically grounded causes. Nor does saying so brand one as an arrogant unreconstructed prescriptivist.
July 10, 2019 at 11:44 am
dmRoberts
If you point out to a speaker of American English that the word “covert” is none other than the familiar word “covered’ spelt differently but pronounced identically, he or she won’t know what you’re talking about. What he or she knows, in respect of what the eye registers when it meets black on white, is that “overt’ rhymes with – to his or her mind, what else? – “overt’ and must be pronounced accordingly.
The same holds for the American use of the word career as the noun for somebody’s c.v., rather than as the verb signifying precipitate action. Institutionalized illiteracy, given the subsequent imprimatur of dictionaries, accounts for this, as I see it. A mistake, or an inaccurate usage, is no less so for being perpetuated and subsequently approved by constituted authority.
is it prescriptive to want to use different words to describe different things – careen for cleaning of a ship’s barnacle-encrusted hull, career for headlong rapid advance? Or to speak of a horse “champing” at the bit instead of chomping? ( (The two activities being not at all the same action.) To ride roughshod (or in American English: to run roughshod”) over distinctions of meaning is to impoverish language and render it a blunter instrument than it might otherwise be.
July 10, 2019 at 11:47 am
dmRoberts
“The same holds”: apologies, I ought to have said; ‘ something of the sort holds,” etc.
June 16, 2023 at 4:47 am
How to Use Careen vs. career Correctly
[…] “Career vs. “careen” at GrammarphobiaThe meaning of “careening” at Motivated Grammar […]