For the love of all that is holy, people – stop saying “on accident”.
It is “by accident”.
“On accident” makes, grammatically and etymologically, no sense.
Anyone who says “on accident” in my presence again will be maced. And not a jury in the world will convict me – provided the jury is all literate people.
Some risks are worth taking.
But Mitch, if you intentionally do things On Purpose, then you must inadvertently do things On Accident, right? Because parallelism and symmetry are the hallmarks of the English language.
And please stop saying it was an accident when it was the logical consequence of what you knew you were doing. No, son, when you are dancing wildly around the room with your glass of cool-aid, it was NOT an accident that the drink stained everything all around as you lost control of the glass and it broke. It was not intentional, but neither was it an accident.
(e.g. DUI is NEVER an accident…..it is an unintended, but forseeable consequence of drinking and driving)
This post made me chuckle about the father of an old friend of mine that I met while I lived in Texas.
His family moved to the U.S. from Austria and his father spoke with a pronoounced accent. As he got acclimated to life in this country, he heard people around him comment about “the moon”. He assumed that all of the planets were referred to that way. Consequently, the Mars, the Venus, etc; was the way that he refered to them.