3mo ago

National Highways to stop using the word ‘accident’ in UK

www.fleetnews.co.uk National Highways to stop using the word ‘accident’

National Highways move branded a ‘significant step forward’ in recognising the preventable nature of road collisions.

This is really a big step in my opinion, as language choices can shape opinions, as the article states "a ‘significant step forward’ in recognizing the preventable nature of road collisions."

32 comments

"Why don't we use the word accident again?"
"Because accident implies there's no-one to blame."
- I got into an "on purpose"
- Accident also requires that you are making a good faith attempt to prevent said accident

in UK
Now they call it an "oopsie whoopsie automobiley dealy"
- The official new word is "collision".
  Also "accident" is being phased out in recognition of the fact that crashes should be prevented, not considered an unavoidable or acceptable downside of automobile use.
  Accident implies there is no culpability.
  
  I think the poster was making a joke based on this image (or similar ones):
  
  The official new word is “collision”.
  Oopsie, I just had a collision in my underwear.
  
  There goes the automobile industry's last bits of influence on the public at minimizing the mechanical death machines
- In your head, is the whole country Mr Bean?
  
  No, there's also the violent mobs with no teeth but only literally, the queen(?) and mold
  
  Well, there are Mrs Beans too, I'm sure.

“Collision” is the word. While most of them aren’t intentional, very few of them are unavoidable. See, e.g., the lady who passed me on a double yellow blind curve on a 25mph residential road in front of a school, only to stop next to me at the red light 50ft down the street

Good. There is nothing accidental about the horrible way people drive and the utter disregard for other's lives that they display behind the wheel. Cars are a horrible way of getting around but people's bad driving makes things so much worse than they need to be.
My dad and I have jokingly been calling them "intentionals" for a while now.

The police in the UK have called them "road traffic incidents" for at least 15 years now
- Incident still sounds too close to accident. I vote we call it "consequences".
  
  negligence is a good word
  
  Yeah I like that, and then we can grade the consequences as Code Brown, Code Yellow, Code Red.

Casually everybody will obviously carry on saying "accident" for now, but I wonder how fast it will filter down from official language to every day language. Would be interesting to watch the trend over the next few decades. Like how people still say "road tax".

He said: “Most crashes are not ‘accidents’ but are avoidable, normally by drivers and other road users paying more attention.”
And to take it a step further, some blame should be cast on the peoole who design roads to be as dangerous as they are.
You can design a road that effectively forces drivers to both pay attention and drive more slowly.
But since roads aren't designed with safety in mind, you get far too many "accidents"🙄

But can we change this to "attempted murder"? Cars are weapons and should be banned/regulated as such.

32 comments