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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Lew Alcindor, under the adopted name of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, became famous in the 1970s and 1980s. In Jabbar’s twenty years as a basketball pro he was known for his athletic shooting and charismatic court play. Kareem would show up on most listings of the top three basketball players of all time.
Not that he needs another reason for notoriety, but Kareem may have lent his name to an eggcorn. Here are three of about a dozen web pages that use “kareem†as a verb in a way that appears to be eggcorning another expression:
A blog entry: “It would kareem off my Dad’s ottomon or just slam hard against the wall†(http://jimoleary.blogspot.com/2008/07/l … e-rag.html)
Description of a Mickey Mouse cartoon: “After a silly yet senseless game of hot potato out of bounds, the football players continue to wreck every place the ball was in sight…even after it landed inside a tuba, kareemed off a drum, and found its way inside the mouth of a fan (possibly a W. C. Fields caricature), taking his teeth, glasses and hair with it.†(http://www.disneyshorts.org/years/1932/ … ickey.html)
Newspaper sports article: “Peterson fielded a ball that had kareemed off third basemen Katie Rickets glove and made a throwing error to first base.†(http://www.reviewatlas.com/archive/x176 … h-in-state)
I’m not always sure what acorn lies behind these uses of “kareem.†In the third example, the writer probably meant “caromed off.†The verb “carom,†which means something like “bounce off of,†is borrowed from the banking pool shot of the same name. Other instances of “kareem†may be eggcorning “careen,†also used to describe a bounce-off action, though the word usually carries with it connotations of hard leans and tight turns.
Last edited by kem (2008-11-19 12:10:49)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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The fit is much better with careen than with carom , especially if carom is pronounced as I have always heard it (and the dictionary confirms), with the accent on the first syllable. (Anybody else use to play Caroms? “Sunday School poolâ€, you might call it.) Even if it were pronounced ka-ROM —is it?— eggcorning would be pretty much ruled out by phonological non-subtlety: you couldn’t use it in spoken form without it being obvious that you were pronouncing a different word.
People do use careen in contexts where carom would be more appropriate, so even examples like your third one would be reasonable to analyze as arising from careen << carom rather than directly from carom . (I would think of careen << carom as a non-eggcorn malapropism.) The final m of course does fit carom , and I would here suspect (as I do almost everywhere :~ ) that blending may well be at work.
Interestingly, careen in this sense (as opposed to the sense of turning a boat bottom-side-up to expose its carina ‘keel’) has often been accused of being a malapropism for career . If that is what happened, I think we would consider that malapropism to have been an eggcorn. It suffers the fate of overly-successful eggcorns, and no longer fits in the category because it is too widespread. Here is the usage note from the dictionary I consulted:
The implication of rapidity that most often accompanies the use of careen as a verb of motion may have arisen naturally through the extension of the nautical sense of the verb to apply to the motion of automobiles, which generally careen, that is, lurch or tip over, only when driven at high speed. There is thus no reason to conclude that this use of the verb is the result of a confusion of careen with career, “to rush.” Whatever the origin of this use, however, it is by now so well established that it would be pedantic to object to it.
Nice find!
ps. I keep getting the image of a basketball, having been thrown by an exceptionally large and strong basketball player, bouncing from the basket to the backboard or the posts behind the backboard, kareeming around the court …
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-11-19 18:32:52)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Kareem may have used the backboard somewhat less than his co-pros, but yes, I think you point is a good one-
“kareeming off” may borrow some of its imagery from the backboard bounce.
The careen/career distinction was a literary fad, one of these Fowlerized rules that occasionally make the rounds of writers and editors, discovered by some person of significance and repeated endlessly in manuals of style. A more reflective view makes one wonder what it was all about.
Last edited by kem (2008-11-20 11:48:08)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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It might be only slightly relevant, but in English Billiards [3 balls], the word ‘cannon’ is used when the cue ball hits both other balls. This is like ‘carom’ in pool.
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