to terminate a process before its completion

Then it was on to the Dolls; a solo career as blue-eyed soul shouter; Buster Poindexter; and his postmillennium backwoods-music project, David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, named for the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Him portioned maids, apprenticed orphans, blest.

From the prevailing colonial perspective, the English of the babus was error-ridden and characterised by over-elaborate ornateness, and for these ‘transgressions’ it became the butt of native-speaker ridicule.