careen

Use this forum to discuss past Good Words.
Jeff hook
Junior Lexiterian
Posts: 73
Joined: Sat Jan 07, 2006 5:29 pm
Location: East Orange, NJ, USA

careen

Postby Jeff hook » Thu Sep 13, 2007 2:34 pm

CAREEN

Printable Version

Pronunciation:

kê-reen

Hear it!


Part of Speech: Verb

Meaning:

1. (Transitive) To turn (a ship) over on its side for cleaning and repairing.
2. (Intransitive) To rush headlong, swerving and tilting at high speed; to pitch or tilt to one side.

Notes: Today's Good Word was brought to Jon Freeman's attention listening to Carlotta's song "I'm Still Here" in Stephen Sondheim's Follies. In this song Carlotta croons that she has "careered from career to career". In singing so, Carlotta succumbs to a confusion of the noun career with today's word that has plagued US English speakers since at least 1923. Don't repeat Carlotta's mistake; help us obviate it altogether.

In Play: Today careen can mean racing at such a high speed as to barely maintain control of your vehicle: "When Randolph heard that Phil Anders was at Randolph's girl-friend's house, he went careening down the street on his bike like he was on fire." It can also mean to tilt or even pitch over: "Rick O'Shea turned the corner so fast, his car ran off the road, careened off a wall and overturned."

Word History: Today's Good Word comes from the Middle French word carene "keel". French inherited this word from Latin karina "keel" which, used as a verb, meant "to keel (a ship)", that is, turn it on its keel. Karina originally meant "nutshell", though, which explains how the same original root (Proto-Indo-European kar-) ended up in English as hard. This sense is not too far removed from that of Greek kratos "strength, power", also from kar-, which we find in such words as democracy "power by the people", and various other '-cracies'. (We hope that today's contributor, Jon Freeman, didn't careen any in getting this Good Word to us.)
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•The Good Dr. Goodword

(Feel free to "touch up" my sub-par HTML, JH.)
Last edited by Jeff hook on Thu Sep 13, 2007 6:39 pm, edited 4 times in total.

sluggo
Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 1476
Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2006 1:58 pm
Location: Carolinia Agrestícia: The Forest Primeval

Postby sluggo » Thu Sep 13, 2007 2:42 pm

Jeff, I think only you can edit your own post. It looks good, although I'd cut out "printable version" from the original as well as "hear it!" since we can't transfer the sound link afaik. But you can do this edit any time, there's no limit.

Doc's format has been 24-point olive for the word heading if you want to make it a good-looking counterfeit. And a run-through may be advised; I caught a typo in arrant and fixed it before posting.

So I was thinking we could transfer just one a day to digest rather than a torrent. Careen is actually from 9/12, so still outstanding would be 9/5 through 9/11. I'll go ahead and post 9/5 tomorrow evening unless someone else does.
Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots! Knife no one, fink!

Jeff hook
Junior Lexiterian
Posts: 73
Joined: Sat Jan 07, 2006 5:29 pm
Location: East Orange, NJ, USA

CAREEN

Postby Jeff hook » Thu Sep 13, 2007 2:58 pm

I'd better let you or the other "Grand Panjandrums" handle it. You folks all seem to have good coding skils, but, as you can see, I don't! My intentions were good, but I don't want to do any more damage. (Mark Bailey's sure to object to all this "meta talk," but I couldn't find how to enable HTML on the "data entry" page for posting new threads in this forum, even though HTML is set to "Always Allow" in my "profile"... I may figure this out eventually, but I'm "out of my league" now.

I was able to copy the direct URL of the mp3 for the "Hear It" feature from the "Good Word entry" page's source code, and it seems to "work" when it's pasted as Plain Text into my edited posting here.)


Jeff Hook
NJ, USA
Last edited by Jeff hook on Thu Sep 13, 2007 3:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Perry
Great Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 2306
Joined: Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:50 am
Location: Asheville, NC

Postby Perry » Thu Sep 13, 2007 2:59 pm

The good doctor is on a ship. Hopefully, he won't be careen-hauled, nor will they careen the ship for cleaning while he is aboard.
"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Lately it hasn't been working."
Anonymous

sluggo
Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 1476
Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2006 1:58 pm
Location: Carolinia Agrestícia: The Forest Primeval

Postby sluggo » Thu Sep 13, 2007 3:06 pm

No damage at all Jeff, you did fine.

For future ref, it's not complex, you just highlight what you wanna edit, then go to color, size, bold, ital, underline etc to apply to your subject. You'll see the brackets [example]before text, followed by [/example]. If you want to adjust size just change the number. For inserting URLs you'll get a [URL=] and just insert the URL after the equals.

Thanks for pitching in. Every bit helps.

{edit: OK Jeff I'm stumpified. Where did you find the sound link?}
[/offtopic]
Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots! Knife no one, fink!

Jeff hook
Junior Lexiterian
Posts: 73
Joined: Sat Jan 07, 2006 5:29 pm
Location: East Orange, NJ, USA

Meta Talk

Postby Jeff hook » Thu Sep 13, 2007 4:15 pm

(Pace Mark Bailey. This is now a "meta" thread, but, hey, "no harm done.")

++++

{edit: OK Jeff I'm stumpified. Where did you find the sound link?}
[/offtopic]

++++


1. "CAREEN" is displayed as a "Good Word of the Day," at:


http://www.alphadictionary.com/goodword/date/2007/09/12


I used normal word processing techniques to "select" the hyperlinked <Hear it!> text on that page, being sure not to include a preceding or following blank space in my "selection." (Unwittingly including such a space or such spaces in the selected text would "throw off" your later search of the Web page's source code, as I explain below.) I then copied that selection, by left-clicking "Copy" in its context menu, but you could hit the keyboard Ctrl+C keystroke combination, or you could left-click Copy on your browser's tool bar.

2. Left-click "Source" in your browser's "View" menu. That will display the Web page's source code (HTML) in Plain Text, probably in a separate NotePad page, or in whatever "text editor" you're using in your set-up.

3. Use that new word processing file's Edit\Find menu by pasting <Hear it!> into the file-search data-entry field.

4. This is the relevant code for the entire <Hear it!> section of content on the "CAREEN" page. (I forget the tags for adding code as "sample code," i.e. for "disabling" it "as" code, and for displaying it as mere Plain Text. I hope this works... This should appear as the HTML code "behind" the page, in Plain Text, not as the formatted content which you'd see on the "CAREEN" page. The "Code" button on this page's button bar may achieve that result, but I hope these <samp></samp> tags will have the same effect...)

(You're looking for a full URL which appears in quotation marks, following an "href=" prefix. I'll highlight the text which your text editor found for you, in bold blue, but notice I'm displaying here all of the code for that entire section.)

+++++++++

<samp>…<strong>Pronunciation:</strong>
<a href="http://www.alphadictionary.com/pronunciation_guide.html">
k&ecirc;-<b>reen</b>
</a>
<span id="hearitbullet">&bull; </span>

<a id="hearit" href="http://www.alphadictionary.com/sounds/careen.mp3"><strong style="text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer;">Hear it!</strong></a>
<span style="display: none; width: 200px; vertical-align: middle;" id='emptyplayer'></span>
</p>… </samp>

+++++++++

(Notice the "discrete" URL which I've highlighted in bold red. Notice also that each separate mp3 uses the same address, except that each "discrete" address is only distinguished from all others by the substitution of its own "word" in that portion of the address. That "stands to reason," because URLs are only "full file paths," and each mp3 is stored on this site's server(s) in the same folder {"sounds"}, where it's distinguished by its own file name, which is probably <wordname.mp3>. You could therefore use the same full URL for each mp3, changing only the "word name" in the address for each mp3. That would obviate the above "extraction process.")

5. Use standard word processing techniques to select and to copy the URL, which is then copied to the Clipboard. Of course, you don't copy the quotation marks.

6. You can paste the URL from the Clipboard to the draft text which you're composing. The result is a Plain Text URL, not a formatted hyperlink, but it's functional in the posting which other readers will see. When they left-click it, they'll be connected to the remote mp3, because you've provided the remote sound file's direct address.

When text is hyperlinked on a Web page, it's much easier to "extract" the URL which is "hidden behind" the formatted text simply by right-clicking the hyperlinked text, and then left-clicking "Copy Shortcut" in the hyperlink's context menu. That copies the "hidden" URL to the Clipboard, and you can then paste that "address" from the Clipboard to another destination. That's how I usually obtain "clickable" URLs which I paste into my local word processing files. I can then go directly to those remote Web pages from my local files in the future, simply by left-clicking those URLs on the pages of my own files.

An alternative method is to right-click a hyperlink, and then left-click "Properties" in the hyperlink's context menu. It's usually possible to select the "destination" URL in that properties display, but neither alternative method seemed to work in this case, so I went to the source code, where I found the required address easily.

Jeff Hook
NJ, USA


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