Style guide: meteoric

From a Guardian profile of Rebekah Brooks:

A guardian.co.uk search for “meteoric rise” turns up a cool (and faintly sinister) 666 results. The same search on bbc.co.uk gets 563; that almost half of them are in the sport section says something about the formulaic way in which many sporting narratives are reported. An hour spent on any newspaper website will reveal so many meteoric rises that it’s a wonder we’re not constantly funding rescue missions to retrieve politicians and athletes from the earth’s orbit.

Here is a thing about meteors: they fall. In fact I would go so far as to say that, from an earthbound point of view, that is the most important thing about meteors. Yet for some reason meteoric is only ever used to describe an ascent. Even without the inaccuracy the term is lazy and overused.

We have already seen the castration of once-potent words like iconic and legendary. So unless you’re actually writing about shooting stars, please help give this hackneyed expression the soaring decline it deserves.