Thinking About 'Accidents' in a New Way

Here's an article from the Ottawa Citizen that looks at the language we use to describe car accidents (or collisions, or crashes) and how that languages influences the way that we think about them. Language does matter.

Here’s another small but significant detail you may not have noticed reading Payne’s series: She used the word “crash” throughout (never “accident”) to describe how people suffer and die on the road. When I asked her about it, she told me she never uses accident “because that suggests it is not preventable.”