Accidental Deliberation [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

A news story that a friend pointed out began thus (emphasis added):

A woman was in serious condition Wednesday morning after Orange County deputies said a man deliberately ran her over.

The woman and her friend were apparently walking down the side of the road near Orange Blossom trail and Jordan Avenue late Tuesday night when the accident happened. Deputies said the man responsible wanted their attention and wasn't taking no for an answer.

Disregarding for the moment the much bigger issue of what kind of mental world a man has to live in for it to feel reasonable to run a woman over for ignoring him, and the scarier question of what this does or does not say about ways-of-thinking that may be reflected in other aspects of our culture, mostly because I have little to say there yet that is both novel and coherent ... disregarding the big issue for the moment, I wish to issue a "WTF‽" to the language used by the reporter:

Was it deliberate or was it an accident? Please pick one. Given the facts asserted in the rest of the article, it seems the word "accident" is inappropriate here as there was nothing accidental about it. (I'll concede that it is possible for the incident to have been both deliberate and accidental in the "I only meant to get close enough to scare her, but my foot slipped" sense, but it's clear that the authorities don't think that's likely since they said he "deliberately ran her over".)

Similarly, I do not consider certain road-rage incidents resulting in collisions to be "accidents", if one party deliberately sought to force the collision. If I get careless and walk into a signpost, that is an accident; if somebody beats me up, that's an assault, not an accident. Just because an untoward event involves a motor vehicle, that does not make in at accident. Accidents should be accidental.

Okay, I think I've gotten the worked-up-about-trivial-language-stuff thing out of my system for a while.

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I'd give him the benefit of the doubt; could be that he meant to call it an incident.

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I was thinking that, perhaps, there was something in the definition of 'accident'" that would cover such a usage, but no, no variation allows for deliberate acts.

However, "car incident" is far less clear than "car accident", even if the latter is factually inaccurate for deliberate events.

How about "collision"?

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Suitably neutral. :)

I was once almost run over for no apparent reason. I was crossing a street in Newton Center, MA late enough that it was dark. There was little traffic, when suddenly someone came roaring down the street and swerved to the wrong side, where I was crossing. If I hadn't dodged well enough, I'd have been pancaked. It was very surreal.

Yeah, I don't get journalism lingo sometimes. The one that gets me is the use of "terror". For example, the War on Terror. Okay, shouldn't we lump horror flicks, bad practical jokes, and anxiety disorders in that category as well? Why isn't it the "War on Terrorism" or even the "War on Terrorists"? And while I understand the use of "terror attack", shouldn't it still be "terrorist attack" like "Nazi attack" or "orc attack"? Or is the media trying not to implicitly imply that the act was caused by a terrorist and could have been caused by a random idiot who just wanted to blow himself up for fun?

As for the news article, incident seems too light for deliberately running someone over but I can't think of a better word. You're right, accident isn't it.

I have a rant in which I point out that the "War on Terror" can't be won, as generally, concepts are remarkably hard to bomb.

This is a cultural ~habit (primarily sloppiness, as far as I can tell) that has gotten worse over the last few decades (if not longer; that's just how long I've been noticing it). Similar errors, that

ladi_lavinder and I see ever more often, are 'site' vs 'sight', 'there' vs 'their' vs 'they're', and the most obvious, 'an' vs 'and'. This is Not all spell-checkers' fault, despite claims. Oddly enough, 'whether' and 'weather' are very rarely confused.

Speedy typing is all fine IF you at least skim over the text before posting ... but, apparently, many do not. It isn't clear to me whether lack of education (ie. literacy) or clue or care cause this ~plague. Probably some of all of the above.

My father once told me that he had never been able to get through page one of Any major newspaper (he cited the NY Times in particular) without finding at least two significant errors of grammar or usage. I dearly wish I could take issue with him, but I have found the same pattern ever since.

If I hear one more person tell me about how the tenants of their religion shape their consciouses, and reign in their bad habits, I may scream.

For those of you playing our fun home game, that should be "tenets," "consciences," and "rein," respectively.

Well, unless of course, what is meant is that people living in their heads during their waking hours force them to engage in their bad habits....

I suspect the author meant to say incident, or perhaps some other synonym for "event".

Completely random. Is that your horse on your icon?

At the time the picture was take, Bess was my horse. The icon came from one of a couple pictures of me riding her. Alas, we moved off the farm in 2002, and found boarding too expensive, so we ended up giving our 3 horses (Bess, Molly, Sandy) away to a good home.

Oh, how sweet!! What a nice mare you had. It must have been hard giving up your horses and your farm (but not perhaps all the farm work. :) I love Bakshir curlys as well. They're neat horses! I'm about to buy my first horse. I'm exciting about owning my own horse but the committment is rather scary.

Yeah, that sort of stuff really bugs me too. My MSF instructor (motorcycle) talked about "on-purposes", and having an "on-purposal collision" (there are some morons out there who target riders). He also used it to stress the avoidability of many so-called 'accidents', and explained how the "it just happened" mentality is a convenient but dangerous escape especially for situations where one of the motorists doesn't want to admit that they caused the "accident" (partially or wholly).

Dear, that's just Florida journalism. They still haven't figured out that the space shuttle does not launch from Cape Canaveral.

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Accidental Deliberation

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Incident?

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January