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Archive for October, 2009

Have you ever felt there are gaps in the English language? Perhaps it’s being a writer, but from time to time I find myself wondering about why there’s a word for one thing and not another.

Take for example the word accident. Perfectly common English word, but what is its opposite? The thesaurus gives us intention, plan, provision but none of these seem appropriate. If you were in a car and someone quite deliberately rammed you, it might well have been their intention, but was it actually an intention? Doesn’t sound right, does it?

More significantly, there’s a word missing in between the two. Certainly it is an accident if someone’s brakes fail and they crash into you. And it would be an intention (for want of a better word) if they deliberately drove into you, but most of the time what happens is neither of the above. Most of the time what happens is that someone simply doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t apply the brakes when they should have and then runs into you. We term such things as accidents for want of a better word, but to do so colours the incident as somehow nobody’s fault: shit happens and it requires nobody to make a bowel movement for it to do so.

Why does it matter? Well, take for example the Chernobyl disaster (disaster here being a generic word for something that wasn’t a good thing and, again, apportioning no blame). When Chernobyl went up it was because the cooling systems were shut off. It wasn’t intended as an act of terrorism, but neither was it exactly accidental. To call it an accident is to dismiss it as just one of those things, barely worthy of blame.

But there is an opposite effect also. Continual use of the word accident to describe something stupid but avoidable runs the risk of tarring genuine accidents with the same brush. The cyclist whose sudden and unexpected bout of hiccups causes him to swerve in front of you, the ferry driver who puts to sea without knowing that a rare breed of metal eating superbugs have snuck into the hold (although there you could classify the sinking as a terrorist act committed by the bugs): if we live in a world where these things are regarded as accidents and accidents are somehow semi-intentional, then we live in a world where people take out frivolous lawsuits against the paving slabs they trip over or the food they overeat. Clearly, for the sake of sanity we need a word that defines a middle ground, an unintended consequence of a foolish or careless action.

There is some precedence for this kind of grey thinking in our language. Think of murder: in Britain we distinguish between murder, manslaughter and misadventure. In America they go further with degrees of murder – so an incident could be sort of 45% murder, 25% argument and 30% yes, but I didn’t know a broken ketchup bottle was sharp. This has evolved because it’s all too easy to dismiss the outcome of a trial as unfair or disproportionate. To regard accidentally decapitating someone who started an argument with you whilst you were operating a strimmer as purposefully persuading them to go to B&Q with the intention of so disabling them is clearly unsatisfactory.

Language clearly doesn’t require quite as much gradation. We don’t need a hundred words for accident any more than the Eskimoes need their mythical hundred words for snow. It’s not unreasonable, however, to have at least some gradation. In this spirit I would therefore like to propose duncequence for everything between accident and intention. It’s easily understood and etymologically sound, which is always a good start. If you rang the insurers as a victim of a duncequence they’d know to handle things differently than as a victim of an accident.

If the word ever makes it into the OED, remember you saw it here first…