Originally Posted by
njkayaker
You used "fall" and "electrocution" and "accident" as a modifier (adjective) of those more specific/precise terms.
Look how silly it would be if you used accident instead of those specific/precise terms!
???
So how do we get from this to:
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
This is silly. No one is arguing that "accident" is not used for a synonym for "collision"!
Which is it?
My point stands: If someone walks in and says "I just had an accident", unless that person happened to be 3, you'd assume they were speaking of a car accident, most likely (even though it
could have been any number of things). "Accident", even though it is being used as a noun, is practically still filling the role of an adjective because the "car" before the word is implied; it's just become the most common use of the word, that in most contexts it's merely assumed to be a vehicular accident. Common speech morphs like this all the time.
Regardless, it doesn't matter in regards to my point. My point was that there isn't really anything wrong with the word "accident";
it does not, by it's nature, imply a lack of guilt or negligence (and I've shown this already), it merely means that what happened was unintentional, which is true in nearly all cases (excluding cases like the LA doctor who intentionally ran cyclists down).
If you want to use another word that you feel is more apt, there's nothing wrong with that, and I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm merely saying others shouldn't harp on people for using the word "accident" when it's clearly a correct term (aside from the fact it's making a mountain out of a molehill in the first place).