“On Accident” or “By Accident”? | Hacker News Reader

“On Accident” or “By Accident”?

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On accident is one of those American sayings that sounds weird to my English ears. Like poop. where did the second p come from???

That said, I think our dialects are merging, (well more likely British English is becoming Americanised, but you guys make all the tv, so that's to be expected), for example, when I was younger no one said "ass", it was always "arse", but nowadays it's nearly always "ass"; except for the older generations.

But, we have the same problem within the UK, in the north, we have three meals, breakfast, dinner and tea. In the south they have breakfast, lunch and dinner. It can be very confusing, especially in films when someone invites someone round for tea, but there's no food and it's 1pm!

Funny, before I read the article I thought that "on accident" must be some British English bastardization since it sounds so weird to my American ears. But I was born in the late 70's and haven't lived in the US since 2000, so maybe that explains it.

I personally say "by accident" and was born in 86 (during the period the author says speakers are split) and "on accident" has always sounded odd to me, and almost wrong, although when I was in school I do recall people saying both with a pretty even split (as much as I can remember, anyway).

As a South African, the first time I saw "on accident" was from an American on IRC.

At the time I assumed he was just one of those uneducated redneck hillbillies I'd heard of who can't English proper. But it turns out that's just how young people speak these days.

As an American born in 1994, I have to say that "by accident" sounds a bit funnier than "on accident," which I hear more frequently. However, I feel that I usually say "accidentally" instead of either phrase.

/sophomoric humor coming...

It's "poop" because when you say that word, your lips make the same motions that your nether region makes while doing it.

The same is true of the phrase "explosive diarrhea".

Interestingly Google ngrams has 'poop' as more popular, even in British English.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=poo%2Cpoop&yea...

Interesting, and very much an American thing - never heard anyone say 'on accident' here in the UK.

Me either. Although I'm in the "Before around 1970" group, so maybe I'm self-selecting my experience based on my similar-age peer group.

Funnily, "Me either" is also an americanism that seems rather foreign to me. (Me neither would be more likely to be used in the UK in my experience). I think both are rather informal and so neither is necessarily incorrect.

http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/33544/what-is-the-dif...

I never claimed to be any good at English :)

Seconded. I've never heard this in the UK from people of any age.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the way "an" sounds when spoken with an American accent. A mishearing and then repetition of "an accident" seems much more plausible to me than confusion with "on purpose".

"An" in American sounds like "Anne", so I don't think that explains it. As an aside I've never heard someone say "on accident" so it might just be stupid people. Another good example is "would of" instead of "would have".

To be clear though, you could contract "would have" as "would've" -- the mistake there is again the mis-hearing as "would of", I suppose.

Neither have I. Sounds very strange to my ears.

I've never heard 'on accident' out of a British person, even living in Canada. I've heard it out of many Canadians and Americans alike - but I've equally heard many of them use 'by accident'. I hadn't registered the generational divide though. I thought it was just commonly used in both forms [even though I personally correct them in my head every time they do it]. It grates on me when they use "I could care less".

What also bothers me that I've heard out of many British people, but never yet a Canadian or American is 'can I lend that thing from you?'... you can't lend something from its owner. As the lender, you are the owner of the property to be lent. Thus you can lend something to someone or borrow it from them, but you can't borrow it to someone or lend it from someone.

I wouldn't usually just throw out a data point but since so many people here are saying they haven't heard it in the UK, I'm in the UK and certainly do hear "on accident" occasionally and have used it myself - it is less common though (An exclamation of "it was on accident!" is the most natural use I can think of - which fits with the idea it came via "on purpose"). Disclaimer: I am somewhat into youth culture and use a lot of slang in everyday speech.

(So I just asked my employees - who are somewhat younger than me. They had heard of it, claimed not to use it, and believed it was poorly educated people with a poor grasp of English who used it in their experience.)

Are you sure, it's not "It was an accident" ?

I never heard or read it in the US until recently (15 years-ish).

No, but we have a similar one - lend and borrow have become interchangeable. "Can you borrow me an X" or "I lended (not even word AFAIK) it from him" is one I hear often from younger folks.

When they grow up, if enough of them still say "lended", it will be put into the dictionary.

Lended is also an Americanism.

That one I understand. It was an exception anyway; lended is more straightforward. Like 'builded' vs 'built'. The sign on our old 1800-era edifice says "Builded 1838" so I guess they used to use that (or at least write it that way)

Indeed. Language evolves, or we'd all be speaking PIE. Just sounds funny to my fossilised ear.

Idiocracy.

I've heard "lent" but never "lended".

"I lent a pen off him", "he lent me a pen". Could be a Northern thing though.

Turns out "lent" is actually the past tense of "lend". Not sure where my head was this afternoon.

'lended + from' is new to me, only heard 'lended + to' in the past...

One I noticed in popular use a few years ago (Canada): the word "itch" as a verb, i.e.: "I itched it" "he was itching himself"

Sounds odd to me.

The computer programmer in me says both are valid:

"on accident" is a pre-prepared behavior that will be employed when an accident occurs in the future.

"by accident" is metadata accompanying an event, reporting the author or agent that created the event.

It sounds like old-style BASIC exception handling.

    ON ACCIDENT GOTO EMERGENCYROOM

Or modern JavaScript event handling. Button.onAccident(function() { ... });

In the first case, it would be more clear to say "upon accident."

Except that's not how it is used, it is used in place of "by accident."

"I knocked over the glass on accident."

Whoa, what? You learn something new everyday on here. I have never heard anyone in the US say "on accident."

Does "on accident" even make sense? The preposition "on" in this case implies intent, so who is causing accidents on purpose? And if you are, then it's not really an accident, it's sabotage.

I grew up saying it in Oklahoma. My wife (from Virginia) would always say, "It's BY accident, ON purpose." So just to mess with her I started saying, "ON accident, BY purpose", which sounds just as strange to my ears.

Just goes to show the arbitrariness of prepositions associated with verbs. It's one of the hardest things to learn as a foreign language.

I do recall amusement when learning German, attempting to say I travelled 'on' the bus, only for it to literally mean on the roof of the bus.

Perhaps it's just newspeak, catering for the difference between accidents and deliberate "accidents".

Perhaps it evolved from "accidentally on purpose", which was a pretty 90's expression.

Here's another one: In New Zealand they say "they are different to us" instead of the American "they are different from us". Always trips me up. Arbitrary I suppose; any preposition will do because the comparison is in thought-space not physical space.

"different to" is the normal form in British English too, although you hear both.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I don't think I have ever seen "on accident" used on the Internet. Do people really say "I did this on accident"? It just sounds wrong.

In a naive google search it gets masked by discussions like this one - but some extra filtering can find examples: https://www.google.com/search?q="it+was+on+accident"+-"by+ac...

I was going to comment "accidentally" but first google result says: Accidently vs. Accidentally? Dang you english.

A thought I had while reading: Neal (the author) reports that Barrat found "on purpose" to be used "to the near exclusion of by accident" by "speakers born after 1995". However, Neal then goes on to ask:

> why did the new form suddenly edge out the old in the mid-1990s?

Based on the fact that the years listed in the first section were the birth-years of the speakers, I would guess that the main cultural transition actually took place around 2000-2005, when speakers born after 1995 would be developing their dialects.

I suppose it could be argued that the shift must have happened earlier based on the mixed usage among speakers born as early as 1970, but at any rate, the complete takeover seems to have happened around the millennium change.

An interesting companion would be J.L.Austin's "A Plea for Excuses", where he contrasts "by mistake" and "by accident".

(Google books link, but the PDF is available widely)

https://books.google.no/books?id=CPKHKvge3Z4C&lpg=PA379&ots=...

Language evolves. Sounds like "on accident" is winning, and it'll probably take over completely in another decade or two.

But it'll always sound wrong to me.

I've never heard it in Canada. So it seems to be US only...

Actually most of the comments about it say that their children picked it up in elementary school. Given the wide and sudden spread I suspect that this can be traced back to some children's TV show or classroom video.

I had an interesting similar experience, related to pronunciation of the phrase "en route". I pronounce it the way you'd say it in French ("on route" without the "n" sound). He misheard me as saying "on route" and tried to correct me to something that sounded more like "in route" pronouncing the "en" the way you would in English.

I was born in the first half of the 80s and the only person I've ever known to use "on accident" is my sister born towards the end of the eighties. It sounds stupid and myself and my family have always corrected her. I wasn't aware this was some sort of societal movement.

I've always said "accidentally", rather than "by accident". To my ear, "by accident" sounds almost as archaic as "by your leave". Maybe "on accident" comes from "on [making an] accident".

I almost never hear anyone say'on accident' but If I had to guess, it comes from taking sort of a parallel antonym to 'on purpose'. Did you do it 'on purpose'? No, I did it 'on accident'. It sounds weird to my ears but there is some kind of sense to it.

Maybe. But if I follow that path, I get "accidentally" vs "purposefully". The first is about how it went down, but the second is about how it was carried out. The opposite of "purposefully" is "carelessly" or "recklessly", no?

"On" suggests that there is intention involved. "By" suggests passivity.

How would you describe an intentional accident, and how does that differ from a passive accident? I don't see a scenario where the distinction could even apply.

Wouldn't the fact of intention contradict the notion of an accident?

Perhaps that's the subtle humour behind this linguistic change?

"I broke your mug on accident", at the fifth word, the listener/reader thinks the other person is about to say "on purpose", but suddenly they say "on accident". Hence it's funny, reduces the tension about them breaking your mug.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/onaccident.html

I never hear "on accident" here in Australia.

Likewise.

And I remember the first time I heard an American say "I'm really pissed!" and my mate said, "what have you been drinking?"

I won't even mentions the confusion when an American lady mentioned that she had a sore fanny.

Could exposure to the internet and social networking have any bearing on this?

I was born in January 1995, and "on accident" sounds bizarre to me.

"traffic collision"

"new baby"

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