Accident and incident are synonyms in English (British English, at least): “there’s been a horrible incident at the radioactive spider breeding facility”, “the road is shut due to a traffic incident”, “delays on the Piccadilly line due to an incident involving a person on the line” etc
Just turned to my husband and said “事故の意味？” and he said “incident” right away, followed up with “specifically for traffic”.
Can I ask what the justification for not allowing it is, please? I tried to search for an answer on here but couldn’t see one.
Okay, I’m not a native English speaker so take this with a grain of salt, but they aren’t synonyms are they? It’s an “All accidents are incidents, but not all incidents are accidents” kind of deal.
An incident is synonymous with an occurrence I think, and accidents are things that occur. In the examples given you can infer from context that the incidents referred to are accidents, but you could also say there was “a curious incident at the café” and you wouldn’t interpret that as necessarily involving a accident, right?
Looks like they added it July last year, as a result of this post in the “Worst Typos” thread, though the poster didn’t provide any justification at the time for why they felt it was blocklist worthy, and the mods didn’t give any justification for why they agreed.
Maybe it was to deliberately make it distinct from 事件.
You can have incidents that were the result of intentional actions- something like arson is an incident but deliberate. But I’m not sure that’s enough to say that “incident” is an incorrect meaning for this word"
I’ve never heard the term “traffic incident” in American English before.
To be clear, I’m not saying incident is wrong for 事故. The Japanese definition says the thing that occurs is bad and unexpected, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s an accident.
I’m thinking it might be because “事故” may only refer to the subset of incidents that are also accidents and so it’s disallowed so we won’t think “事故” has a broader meaning than it actually does. According to Cambridge Dictionary: “an event, esp. one that is either unpleasant or unusual” ← actually covers a lot of possible non-accidental events.
When I hear incident for traffic it’s always from the news, e.g. “An incident in the left lane on northbound 405…” but yeah in normal conversations people usually say accident.
If this is the case, then shouldn’t the answer strictly be “traffic accident” and “traffic incident”? Because similar to this:
All traffic accidents are accidents, but not all accidents are traffic accidents.
Oh dear, I wasn’t expecting to see my post generate a discussion months later.
Thank you for drawing my attention to this, @Belthazar . I didn’t give a reason back then but I thought of it the same way like @Beyond_Sleepy, as in “all accidents are incidents, but not all incidents are accidents” and that accident and incident are not really synonyms.
However, I’m not a native English speaker, so hearing the input of all commenters who are native (American, British and Australian) English speakers has clarified it to me now and confirmed that I have made a mistake back then as they are indeed synonymous. Sorry about that, everyone.
Apparently it was first used as a euphemism for an event with the potential to cause a crisis in 1913, and now a hundred years later the euphemistic sense of the word seems to have become the standard definition of it:p
I agree with this as a native speaker. Example of where incident can be used but accident cannot. If your kid got into an argument at school, you might be told by the teacher: “There was an incident with your child at school today”. Your first thought would not be an accident (if they told you significantly after what happened)
