"It’s official – there is no longer any such thing as an accident. The word ‘accident’ is to be banned from the new edition of Britain’s Highway Code, which is published by the UK Department of Transport. Instead the words ‘collision’, ‘crash’ or ‘incident’ will be used to describe events that once were known as accidents.
This adoption of new terms for everyday events does not only have linguistic significance. The banning of the A-word is a consequence of a broader cultural outlook which insists that nothing happens accidentally these days and that there is always someone to blame.
The change in terminology reflects a dramatic shift in the way that Anglo-American societies make sense of human experience. The compulsion to blame is growing all the time. That is why the word accident is being written out of existence.... writing off the A-word highlights the profound difficulty that Western societies have in accepting that misfortune is part of life.
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1 comment:
I always thought the word Accident was a poor choice for most of the incidents it was used to describe. To me there should have been two catagories for the police reports:
1) an accident - mechanical failure or event that was not a result of human error
2) an Ignorant - where thru the carelessness or stupidity of the operator you had a wreck.
Accidents are unavoidable. There is no way you can tell your brakes are going to fail and so there is no prevention you could take to mitigate the damage.
Ignorants are cause by human error or stupidity and are preventable, such as failure to obey the rules of the road.
Accidnts should by law not be considered an element of risk for your auto insurance premiums. Ignorants on the other hand, should be :)
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