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by Youden
21 days ago
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> [...] a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident [...] This is surely the first time I'm seeing "on accident" from a journalist. I get that it's used in casual speech but it's never been normal in formal contexts where "proper" use of language is considered important. To back up my words with evidence, take a look at [0]. If you look at some of the examples from the late 90s [1] you'll see that most of the uses of "on accident" that did exist weren't even used in the "accidentally" sense but in contexts like "on accident compensation" or "on accident rates" - to introduce a topic. To eliminate that, we can do something like [2] and see that this modern construction basically didn't exist until 2010. If you play with the corpus, you can see that it's not really used in English English, only American English. [0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=on+accident%2C... [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22on%20accident%22&tbm=bks&... [2]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=it+accidentall... |
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