
How Language Helps Erase the Tragedy of Road Deaths - prostoalex
http://nautil.us/blog/how-language-helps-erase-the-tragedy-of-millions-of-road-deaths
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x1798DE
> “car accident” on the grounds that it presumes that the drivers involved are
> blameless—a presumption that is correct only 6 percent of the time

Uh, that is _not_ the connotation that anyone has when they hear "car
accident". Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to say, "Whose fault was the car
accident?"

Accident just means it wasn't intentional. I think very, very few "vehicular
collisions" are intentional.

Not that it matters. This Orwellian shit _rarely_ flies with the general
population, anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a Rose of the
Prophet Mohammed and some Freedom Fries.

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tomjen3
I think more collisions than most would assume were intentional, unless you
have easy access to guns it has to be the simplest way to commit suicide.

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chewxy
Villager: "What happened, Danny?"

PC Butterman: "Car accident"

Villager: "Nasty way to go"

Sgt Angel: "Official vocab guideline state we no longer refer to these
incidents as 'accidents'. They're not 'collisions'"

PC Butterman: "Right"

PC Butterman: "Why can't we call them accidents again?"

Sgt Angel: "Because accidents imply there's no one to blame"

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deepsun
The Traffic Safety report by DoT they refer to doesn't differentiate between
people involved and drivers that caused accidents.

I'm thinking that some two-digit percent of deaths are really blameless,
because it's some other vehicle crashed into them. Just for example, a young
male driver was speeding and misjudged a maneuver and collided with a vehicle
with a family of 4 inside.

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xapata
> was speeding

You're saying that's blameless? If someone were speeding, I would blame them
for the crash.

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kbob
I think deepsun means the person who died was not at fault.

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mhb
So good news for self-driving car perceptions.

