From Grammarist:
Normalcy was popularized in the early 20th century thanks to President Warren G. Harding’s “return to normalcy” campaign slogan (though the word did exist before then),
It means he/she can jump.
I’m going to have to use that the next time I hear the ask. That’s amazing.
I sort-of agree, and sort-of not.
In some cases the driver e.g. runs the red light in complete control then T-bones some victim. In other cases the driver does lose control of the car which is spinning, sliding, skidding, whatever until it collides with something.
The latter driver did “lose control”. The former did not.
Overall, there is a completely valid complaint here, IMO just not quite the one you suggest: the common implication that car crashes aren’t caused, they just happen. And that the cause, if there even is one, is beyond human knowledge or human intervention. Everybody is just an unfortunate victim of bad luck.
Which implications are of course bunk.
The vast majority of accidents have a clear cause. A driver was doing a shitty job of driving, or of maintaining their car, or of both. As a result of that irresponsible shitty workmanship, they hurt other people and wreck other people’s property.
It’d be nice if that could be said in plain English every time.
I used to work on DOT public awareness campaigns, and we were forbidden from EVER using the term “accident”.
There was nothing “accidental” about them, they were “crashes”, and they had direct causes (unspoken was the logical conclusion: “Hey, YOU’RE the cause, dipshit!”).
Excellent.
In USAF the term was “mishap”. It happened, it was undesirable, and it had a cause that could be identified and corrected. Didn’t matter if it was something minor like somebody dropping a wrench on their foot, or something major like an aircraft crash. It was a mishap.
As to news articles, I think the key thing is the news managers don’t want to appear to assign fault to anyone or anything. That policy forces them into the neutral stance of “it just happened.” Now if some police or fire department spokesperson is willing to lay out a cause and therefore someone at fault, they’ll be happy to quote that. But not talk about that except in the form of a direct quote.
Well, your number-one job as a vehicle operator is to not run your vehicle into stuff. I believe there are a variety of ways to describe failure to do your job.
That one rankles me as well, and has since the mid-70s or so. I think what it is, is that it seems like laziness on the part of the journalist/editor. So…the pat response of “lost control” is used instead of “going too fast to negotiate a curve”, or “unable to stop in time due to excessive speed/poor road conditions/excessive speed/poor visibility/inattentiveness”. Let alone any mechanical failures.
We used to joke when reading a newspaper when getting to the part of “driver lost control of his vehicle and…” and mock the situation ( pretending to be a driver holding an imaginary steering wheel ) and freaking out “Ohh Noooo!!!, The car is going crazy for no reason! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!. CRUNCH!”.
It’s probably from a repertoire of pat journalistic boilerplate like “slated”, 'blasts" ( rebukes ), “draconian cuts” and the like.
“Webinar” has that effect on me.
In the in Ottawa Citizen several years ago there was a full page human interest article on local roadside memorials and the stories behind them. One was a memorial beside an entrance or exit ramp (one of those big cloverleaf curved affairs) where Joe Blow’s car just “rolled off” the curve, as if the car was just feeling whimsical and malevant.
Another one like this is when someone’s car/truck/semi “…got stuck on the railroad tracks…” as a train approached. Such BS only because they “stopped” on the tracks (or were trying to outrun the train). They wont ever say the driver was at fault for attempting to bypass the RR crossing arms and got “stuck” in between.
There was an incident where an Amtrak train was stopped for several hours after hitting a shopping cart. They had to investigate the scene thoroughly to make sure it did not belong to an injured homeless person.
“Man cave”. “Den” is still a perfectly serviceable word and don’t even try to give me any misogynistic bullshit about keeping women out.
It was a campaign slogan of Warren G. Harding’s 1920 presidential run, referring to the country returning to a sort of pre-WWI status.
So it’s at least a century old…
Oh, when my friends say “Man Cave”, it’s clearly mocking men. Guys are immature and need a “clubhouse”… (like in the Little Rascals: NO GURLS ALLOWED), and can’t watch Big Macho Sports Stuff without a “Safe Space”.
(I’m a guy and I endorse this message.)
Plenty of people drive too fast, don’t pay attention, etc., WITHOUT their car going skidding across the roadway, so yes, “lose control” is a pretty good description of what happened in this particular crash. The reason they lost control may well have been their own negligence or stupidity, but the end result was a car moving without a human directing (controlling) that movement. One moment they’re controlling the movement in a particular direction, the next moment they no longer have the ability to determine which direction the car is going to go.
Yup. “Lost control” strikes me as a perfectly cromulent way of saying “failed to maintain control.” A bit shorter, too.
Back in college I participated in the search following a similar event. A pack of stray semi-feral dogs led us to the corpse. And by “led” I mean we saw them ecstatically nosing into something, which triggered human suspicions. Ugghh! Not a pretty sight after we drove them off.
It seems blast, blasts, blasted, and blasting have been replaced by slam, slams, slammed, and slamming, at least at Fox News.