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HughPickens.com writes:

Matt Richtel writes in the NYT that roadway fatalities are soaring at a rate not seen in 50 years, resulting from crashes, collisions and other incidents caused by drivers. But don't call them accidents as a growing number of safety advocates campaign to change a 100-year-old mentality that they say trivializes the single most common cause of traffic incidents: human error. "When you use the word 'accident,' it's like, 'God made it happen,' " says Mark Rosekind. "In our society, language can be everything." Rosekind says that the persistence of crashes — driving is the most dangerous activity for most people — can be explained in part by widespread apathy toward the issue. Changing semantics is meant to shake people, particularly policy makers, out of the implicit nobody's-fault attitude that the word "accident" conveys. The state of Nevada just enacted a law to change "accident" to "crash" in dozens of instances where the word is mentioned in state laws, like those covering police and insurance reports and at least 28 state departments of transportation have moved away from the term "accident" when referring to roadway incidents.

The word 'accident' was introduced into the lexicon of manufacturing and other industries in the early 1900s, when companies were looking to protect themselves from the costs of caring for workers who were injured on the job, says historian Peter Norton. "Relentless safety campaigns started calling these events 'accidents,' which excused the employer of responsibility," says Norton. When traffic deaths spiked in the 1920s, a consortium of auto-industry interests, including insurers, borrowed the wording to shift the focus away from the cars themselves. "Automakers were very interested in blaming reckless drivers," says Norton. But over time the word has come to exonerate the driver, too, with "accident" seeming like a lightning strike, beyond anyone's control. "Labeling most of the motor vehicle collision cases that I see as an attorney as an 'accident' has always been troubling to me," says Steven Gursten. "The word 'accident' implies there's no responsibility for it."

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