English
Noun
en-noun|sg=turn around
- context|idiom|sports An upset; a suprising comeback.
Verb
en-verb|inf=turn around|turns around|turning around|turned around
- To physically rotate horizontally 180 degrees.
- To physically rotate horizontally 360 degrees.
#:Turn around once or twice, so I can see that new dress.
- context|idiom|buisiness|buzzword To revert a negative trend - to return (a department or entire buisiness) to profitability.<!--define one buzzword with another...great.-->
- context|idiom|slang To be duplicitous.
#:You can't just turn around and say that it was all my fault.
- context|idiom|transitive|of an idea To ponder from a different viewpoint.
#:Let's turn around that idea again and look at it from another angle.
- context|idiom|colloquial To produce; to output; to generate often with "time."
#:We can turn around 500 units by next week.
- context|idiom|with "Every time I" Annoyingly repetitive or consistently wrong.
#:Every time I turn around he seems to be checking up on me.
- context|idiom|buzzword|with "180 degrees" To effect a positive reversal.
- context|idiom|buzzword|with "360 degrees" To make a situation worse by trying to make it better.
Usage notes
"I turned the project around 360 degrees" is belittled by prescriptivists, mathematicians and cartoonists alike. Often, the speaker intends the meaning of "180 degrees" but by evidence of their complete misunderstanding of conversational geometry, not only says the opposite, but gives listeners a good reason to believe that their intended effect did not come to pass. Instead, the situation was probably made worse; at best, one could suppose the net effect was nil, as if there truly had been a literal 360 degree rotation, exactly as the speaker said.
<!--It would be really, really great if someone could dig up the brief Dogbert (from the w:Dilbert comic strip) lecture on the above topic.-->
Derived terms
turn arounds pos_n
turns around pos_v
turning around pos_v
turned around pos_v
fr:turn around
it:turn around
ja:turn around
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