Question: Career" is given as a synonym of the verb "careen" in the dictionary. Is this a case of two words sounding alike becoming confused with one another?
Answer:The answer to your question is "yes," but only partially. When both verbs appeared in English around the same time, the late 1500s, their meanings were quite unrelated. We had borrowed the noun "career" from Middle French "carriere" for a race course (the French word in turn comes from Middle Latin "carraria" for "a road for vehicles," and ultimately from Latin "carrus," "vehicle"). At the time "riding at the ring," a form of jousting in which the horseman rides at full gallop and inserts his lance through small metal rings, was in vogue. The course was marked off by barriers which necessitated short gallops at full speed and a lot of turning this way and that. So "to career" soon came to mean "to gallop for a short burst a full speed," sometimes with the added sense of turning frequently.
"Careen" was originally a noun used for the position of a ship turned over on one side for repairing or cleaning; a ship so placed was "on the careen." This too came from the French -- their "careen" meant "keel." The related verb "careen," as in "to careen a ship," originally meant "to put (a ship or boat) on the beach to clean or repair the hull."
It wasn't long before "career" had been extended beyond the galloping of horses. The now familiar sense of "to move at top speed" was already being used by the mid-17th century. There was implicit, as well, a headlong or reckless manner in this speed, perhaps a legacy of the contortions and twistings of the jousting steed.
"Careen," on the other hand, has swerved considerably away from its original sense. Its nautical origins were still apparent when it developed an intransitive use in the 18th century, as in "the ship careened," that is, inclined to one side when sailing in a stiff wind. Thus, to forward motion was added the tilt of "careen." Not till the 19th century did other things careen or tilt, such as a table with a broken leg, but it was the 20th century and the invention of a new mode of transportation, the automobile, that brought "careen" to its modern sense of moving fast with a lurching or a swerving motion, and that's when the overlap between "careen" and "career" began.
You can see that to a certain degree "careen" evolved to its present meaning on its own, but it was undoubtedly at least influenced by the likeness in sound and spelling to "career." The evolution has distressed some usage commentators, who feel that any use of "careen" that doesn't involve some sideways motion is an outright error. But words will change meanings despite the protests of pundits, as we know, and the "career" sense of "careen" is now firmly established in American English.
Question: Can you straighten me out about whether punctuation marks should go inside or outside quotation marks? Different people have told me different things about where to put different kinds of punctuation, and I don't know whose rules to follow.
Answer: You've already got one fact straight about punctuating quotations: Styling conventions for using punctuation with double quotation marks may vary widely. Some writers and editors draw a distinction between punctuation marks that belong logically to the quoted material and those that belong to the whole sentence. The dash, question mark and exclamation point, for example, are placed inside quotation marks when they punctuate the quoted matter, but are placed outside the quotation marks when they punctuate the whole sentence. Other marks of punctuation are typically placed inside quotation marks. Commas and periods usually appear within the quotation marks. The only two types of punctuation that are virtually always styled in the same way by everyone are colons and semicolons. They are almost always placed outside of the quotation marks.
This column was prepared by the editors of Merriam-Webster's "Collegiate Dictionary," Tenth Edition. Send questions to: Merriam-Webster's Wordwatch, P.O. Box 281, 47 Federal St., Springfield, MA 01102. Merriam-Webster Inc. Dist. by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
&#copy; Merriam-Webster Inc.
Dist. by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service