Careened is frequently used to describe a vehicle out of control, when the actual word should be 'careered ’ .
Cars could theoretically careen, but would have to go onto two wheels to do so .
The word was originally used to describe heeling a ship over to remove barnacles and growths from the ships keel .
Also Pressurised is used in place of Pressured , as in he pressured me to take action .
Pressurised actually means to fill an enclosed vessel with gas .
I wonder if this is a Britishism; I haven’t seen or heard it yet on this side.
Did anyone mention the confusion around the verbs intern (“to work as an intern”) and inter (“to bury”)?
I’ve often heard people say someone was interned when they mean someone was buried. In a slightly different vein, they may say the deceased was “interred there”, while driving past a mortuary. “You mean, they planted him right on their front lawn, beside the Gates Kingsley Gates sign? How about that.”
I find it hard not to wax sarcastic about things like this; as they result mainly from people hearing and misusing newsreader cliches. Even when correctly used, they’re still tiresome–words like inter, temblor, Pontiff, etc.
I was driving down the road one day, when my phone rang. I answered (hands-free, of course) - it was my boss.
Boss: ‘Wallaby!’
Wall: ‘Yes, Roo?’
Roo: ‘Good news! Your promotion has come through!’
Wal: ‘Yes!’ (Punches air, grabs wheel to stop car swerving into oncoming traffic).
Roo: ‘And we’re putting you in charge of the international division’.
Wal: ‘Woo Hoo!’ (Throws arms into air, jams on brakes to avoid running into car in front).
Roo: ‘And you’ve been earmarked for the next open Board position’.
Wal: (Runs into ditch)
Roo: ‘Wal? Wal? Are you all right?’
Wal: ‘No worries Boss.’
‘I careered off the road’.
n/m (re: aluminum. It was discussed on page 2).
I thought careened was used for a car bouncing all over the place – like off the guard rail. If careened means leaning and careered means going at full speed, I guess the bouncy thing is neither.
It’s an American English/British English thing.
“[no object]** chiefly North American **Move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction:
‘an electric golf cart careened around the corner’”
Some of my favourites include
Moot / Mute - Americans seem to use mute more than moot. Moot of course is the correct word.
Solder. Americans say sodder and the the rest of the world says Sole-der
Buoy - Americans say boo-eee while the rest of the world says boy
Off topic, but one of my pet annoyances is the mis-use of collision and allision.
Collision requires two vehicles / vessels to impact each other.
Allision requires only one vehicle/vessel and one stationary object.
Ships allide with reefs and bridges. Cars collide with each other and allide with lamp-posts.
A certain demographic pronounces “ask” as “axe” and “asked” as “axed.” And I still here lots of adults talking about getting a book from the “lie-berry.”
Also, the n-word ends in “er” and not “a.” How does dropping the ‘r’ somehow make it less offensive?
Says no one ever.
This distinction is not supported by the dictionary.
Merriam Webster:
Bolding mine.
Merriam Webster:
To the extent allide exists at all, it appears to be a rare nautical usage. Using collide instead can’t be considered an error.
I still here too.
Actually it’s not a rare nautical usage. It’s a commonly used term in shipping of all sorts.
Simply do a search on allision - allide is less common.
Even the colonial dictionary MW comes up very early in the list
The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s been rare since the middle of the 20th Century. I can’t find a single usage of either the verb or noun in COCA (which goes back about about 30 years for academic texts, I believe), and the Google N-gram shows it to be essentially flat next to collide/collision. According to this article when it’s used at all, it’s used mostly for official documents in the U.S.
In any case, I’m not really sure what would be the point of using the verb (instead of collide), since the thematic relation (or participant role) of the other thing is going to be expressed anyway (with the prepositional phrase). That probably explains why it’s used so little: It’s just not useful (except to nautical insurance adjusters).
That’s a fairly obsolescent word outside of legal usages and only used for naval incident, thus a car would collide with a bridge, not allide.
How is shipping not nautical?
Most of the links are to nautical and legal use. Allision has 239,000 hits on Google, collision has 112,000,000.
In the unabridged section, indicating that it’s a rare word.
I’m a professional writer and editor and also an aficionado of obscure words. I’ve never heard of either. I would guess they are not in the vocabulary of 99.9% of the population.
In any case, dictionaries indicate that collide/collision is perfectly correct to refer to the impact between a moving object and a stationary one. The contention that using it is somehow wrong is incorrect. Even if a specialize technical word exists for this in legal nautical contexts, it doesn’t make the normal usage of collision wrong.
I assume they meant as in the transport of goods, even by land-only means.
If they did, they were wrong. All the references in the first few pages of Google are to maritime/nautical usage. None refer specifically to shipping by land.
I’m not shocked. It’s not a term I ever ran into through either land based OR water based shipping in my last job, though I will admit that I never read the full contract or anything, and we only shipped via water a few times a year and never had any accidents.
I think “obsolescent” is also pretty obsolescent.