kəˈriːn

careen: In sea language, to heave or bring a ship to lie on one side, for the purpose of calking, repairing, cleansing, or paying over with pitch, the other side […]
To incline to one side, as a ship under a press of sail.

Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

A slab can detach from the stable snowpack beneath it and careen downhill like a runaway tectonic plate that transforms, within milliseconds, into a many-ton, half-frozen wave, subsuming whatever is in front of or on top of it, before instantaneously seizing, when it settles, into a substance resembling cement.

Heidi Julavits, New York Times 31/12/2019

There’s a mismatch, there, between Webster’s nineteenth-century American dictionary entry and the usage of a modern American writer. The slab of snowpack is not leaning to one side, but is instead (we can deduce) moving very rapidly. This is behaviour that Noah Webster, in his dictionary of 1828, reserved to the verb career. In British English, that distinction is still observed, to some extent—a runaway vehicle careers downhill and off the road. But in the USA, somewhere around the start of the twentieth century, people decided that they were going to start saying careen, instead. No-one seems to know why. And the American usage is of course familiar to British English speakers, who find themselves lumbered with two words serving the same function.

And it doesn’t stop there. Here’s another usage of careen, from a New York Post article:

Michael Kay, Giancarlo Stanton, and everyone inside Yankee Stadium for that matter, thought the 33-year-old’s deep fly to left-center field left the ballpark.
Instead, Stanton’s moonshot careened off the wall—but not before Kay got into his signature home run call.

Don’t ask me to explain the baseball jargon, but it’s clear that the ball bounced off the wall—so careen has found another new job, albeit one that isn’t acknowledged by any of my American English dictionaries. This time, it’s apparently substituting for the similar-sounding word carom. Noah Webster didn’t give carom an entry in his original dictionary—it was, at that time, an obscure specialized word (more on that later), but by the mid-nineteenth century it had entered general use, meaning “to strike and rebound”.

So those are my words for today: career, carom, and the distressingly ubiquitous careen, all of which have come to us from French.

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Carom is the newest of this trio, and originated as a technical term in the game of billiards. This game uses the same sort of equipment as snooker and pool, but is played with only three balls—two cue balls (one for each of two opposing players), and a red object ball. One way of earning points in this game is by bouncing your cue ball off both the object ball and your opponent’s cue ball—something that’s called a cannon in the most popular version of the game, English billiards. But English billiards is descended from an older version, French billiards, played on a table without pockets, and in which the English cannon shot is called a carom. This is a shortened version of French carambole, the name given to the red object ball. (And the cannon shot seems to have in turn acquired its name because of a mishearing of carom.)

No-one knows why the French decide to call the red billiard ball la carambole. (We can probably dismiss fanciful connections to the carambola tree, from which we get star fruit.) But they went on to derive a couple of useful words: caramboler, “to collide with”; and carambolage, a multi-car pile-up.

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Career is from French carrière, “racecourse”, from Latin carraria, “road”, in turn from carrus, “waggon”. A horse making a short gallop at full speed was said to pass a career and, by association of ideas, anything moving at full speed could be described as being in full career—which is how we got our current usage of the verb career. The noun, meanwhile, lost its association with rapidity, but retained the idea of following a course. Initially, it referred to a person’s course through life, generally, and only later acquired its specific modern connection to employment and professional progression.

Latin carrus is the origin of a lot of words relating to transport: chariot, carriage, car, carry and cargo. It also gave us charge, which originally referred to the process of loading a waggon, but has taken on enough meanings subsequently to provide material for a whole other “Words” post.

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Careen comes to us from French carène, “keel”, which is in turn from the Latin carina, with the same meaning. It was originally a noun, and a ship was described as being on the careen if it was tilted over to expose its keel. The act of putting a ship into such a position was careenage, and the process was careening. After a couple of hundred years as a purely nautical term, it was adopted into more general use as a synonym for “to lean over; to tilt”. For this usage, the Oxford English Dictionary offers multiple illustrative citations from the novel High Speed (1916), by the American author Clinton H. Stagg, which may go some way towards explaining how careen took over from career in American English. In some passages, Stagg clearly uses the word to mean “tilt”:

The car should have careened until it almost turtled.

But in others, it’s easy to imagine that he’s talking about rapid movement:

A sickening skid, [.‥] a careening lurch that brought a cry from Dan.

An out-of-control vehicle may both career (move rapidly) and careen (tilt), and it may be difficult to distinguish these meanings.

Biological structures that look like keels are often given the Latin name carina, most notably the big flange of bone sticking out of the breastbone of birds, to which the flight muscles are attached. Birds that have this structure are sometimes referred to as the Carinatae. (Those flightless birds that lack a carina are called ratites, from Latin ratis, “raft”—no keel, in other words.) There’s also a carina at the bottom end of your windpipe, where it divides into the two major bronchi leading to the lungs. There’s a very noticeable keel-like ridge where the lower curves of the two bronchi come together—provided, that is, you’re viewing this join from inside the windpipe. Which is the sort of thing anatomists do.

And there’s a Carina in the sky, too—it’s the name of a southern constellation. Originally there was a huge constellation in this vicinity, sprawling along the Milky Way between Canis Major and the Southern Cross. It was called Argo Navis, “The Ship Argo”, after the vessel aboard which the mythological Jason sailed. But it has now been divided into four, while maintaining the nautical reference—Vela, the sail; Pyxis, the compass box; Puppis, the deck; and Carina, the keel.

Here they all are, with the red margin marking the approximate extent of the old Argo Navis: