It was originally a meta-joke way of pointing out you'd left something out by intentionally leaving out the verb in the sentence where you pointed out you'd left something out.
It's since become a meme of sort as a more general way to flag as a joke that you've done something "accidentally" where a fully formed sentence would be more ambiguous.
E.g. "I accidentally created a scheme" might still not be entirely serious about it being an accident, but it's open to interpretation and sets a slightly more serious tone. "I accidentally a scheme" clearly signposts the title is at least in part a joke.
That's true for most language changes, but this is not particularly new at this point, though still new enough that it's understandable that it'll be misunderstood.
Well this was in real life, so you aren't going to get records.
Wikipedia suggests lol is more like 40 years old, but you actually have a written record to back that up.
All I have is my own experience, I wasn't really on the internet until the 2000s so I wouldn't have come across lol until mobile phones and texting became widespread (around 1999/2000).
"I accidentally a" would have been in the 1995 - 2000 time frame. But again that's just my experience of it.
I’ll stand as witness to the fact that ordinary people playfully tortured the language towards humorously cute long, long before one TRS-80 could call another over the phone. The tech just helped these people find and feed off of each other.
I now really want a comprehensive history of its use. It feels recent, but it's also the type of thing it'd be unsurprising to find isolated examples of independent "invention" of from long before it came into common use...
Lol would have become widely used with text messages which is when I came across it, it could have been used back in the BBS days.
"I accidentally a" is basically just teenage humour.
I accidentally <implied sexual thing> a $X. (Obviously becoming more funny the more unlikely it is for any sexual thing to work on whatever $X is).
On top of that you've got the weird language construction, just like speaking like Yoda is hilarious, and you have the perfect thing to spread throughout the playground.
Although internet usage doesn't imply the sexual act.
I accidentally a house
Means i accidentally built? A house.
It's exactly because it's such easy humour I'm curious if there are any older expected uses... It seems pretty clear it gained prominence with the YouTube video someone has referenced, and it may indeed be the first, but we may never really know.
Nah, "I accidentally" came way after "lol". I remember using "lol" as a kid on MSN/ICQ/IRC and "I accidentally" wasn't around until I was a teen at the earliest.
If I were diagramming it, I think I’d still label “accidentally” as an adverb, but would note that the corresponding verb has been omitted. It’s the written equivalent of hearing “Oh my, there’s a gigantic <RADIO STATIC> blocking the road.” The unknown word blocked by the radio static is still the noun, we just don’t know what it is.
Proper verbing would be "accidented", I believe (and I love English for how you can just verb or noun anything - it's like Lisp of natural languages!), but I guess "accidentally" can be chalked up to artistic license.
That's verbing a noun, but I don't think that's what is going on here. I think the title is trying to verb an adverb.
If the "correct" sentence is "I accidentally created a scheme", then I think it would be "accidentallied". In excising the verb, shouldn't one carry its tense over to the adverb?
If the "correct" sentence is "I created an accidental scheme", then it would be "acidentalled".
But verbing the adjective doesn't have the same rhythm as verbing the adverb, in this case. And rhythm is the most important rule of English. The indefinite article needs to fall on a low note, and the adverb form is flexible enough to end on a high note to give a lilting affirmation, whereas the adjective form is not.
English has zero-derivation of verbs [that is, the form of the derived verb is identical to the form of the word from which the verb was derived], and this construction is highly productive; many people have remarked on it. But there's nothing similar for nouns in English, so I don't see why you're listing nouns as parallel to verbs.
The meme expression "I accidentally [missing verb] [something]" does not obey the rules of English, as you can easily tell by the responses saying "you accidentally did what?"
If you really meant that parenthetical, you might be interested in Chinese, where academics sometimes get into arguments over what part of speech a given example of a word should be considered to belong to. There is very little inflection, which makes the confusion possible.
I'm speaking more about language culture, as it's used. My native language, Polish, allows for convenient derivation, but it's not a natural thing to do, and if you try, people will look at you funny. In English, it feels very natural and people will understand you when you do it.
> My native language, Polish, allows for convenient derivation, but it's not a natural thing to do, and if you try, people will look at you funny.
Cultural differences do crop up. The Romans mostly believed that if you wanted to talk about philosophy, you had to do it in Greek; there is a speech preserved from Cicero in which he complains about this belief and gives several examples of how it's possible to say the same things in Latin by using parallel derivational mechanisms. Construction of new words from roots was common in Greek and unusual in Latin.
