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From: BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: Auto accident versus collision; I was wrong
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 21:50:01 -0000 (UTC)
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On Mar 19, 2025 at 2:44:36 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:

> On 2025-03-19 3:42 PM, BTR1701 wrote:
>>  On Mar 19, 2025 at 10:03:23 AM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
>>  wrote:
>>  
>>>  On 2025-03-19 11:45 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
>>>>    The law is entirely semantics. Perhaps ordinary people (who don't watch
>>>>    fictional lawyers on tv and become legal experts like me) don't
>>>>    appreciate this, but a state legislature that employs professionals who
>>>>    are specifically experts in legal language and statutory construction
>>>>    fail to grasp the consequence of a semantic change?
>>>>    
>>>>    In this video, Steve Lehto discusses the unintended consequence of
>>>>    substituting "collision" for "accident" when Hawaii amended a law. Years
>>>>    ago, I was one of those people who stopped using the word "accident",
>>>>    influenced by others who wanted newspaper reporters and others in the
>>>>    media to stop reporting such incidents as "accidents" because the reader
>>>>    or listener would assume that the incident was unavoidable.
>>>>    
>>>>    But that's not what "accident" means. Neither in dictionary definitions
>>>>    nor statutory language has it meant "unavoidable" in which there is no
>>>>    fault to find. Instead, it means that the party at fault for the
>>>>    incident had not committed an intentional act.
>>>>    
>>>>    "Accident", therefore, means "without intent" not "without fault".
>>>>    
>>>>    To the uninformed reader or listener, as "crash" or "collision" is just
>>>>    a factual statement without finding of fault and without proving intent,
>>>>    "unavoidable" isn't incorrectly assumed.
>>>>    
>>>>    Lehto went off on a bit of an incorrect tangent about why people were
>>>>    pushing for the word "accident" not to be used.
>>> 
>>>  When I was driving school buses, I found that my employers never used
>>>  the word "accident". If someone hit something while driving their bus,
>>>  even if it was the merest scratch, it was never an accident: it was
>>>  *always* a collision. (I'm sure this would have been true if a person
>>>  were hit, although I don't recall anyone ever hitting a person while I
>>>  worked there.) I feel sure this was their way of making us take
>>>  responsibility for what had happened. We didn't get to say anything that
>>>  implied that whatever happened couldn't be helped in some way. Even if
>>>  we weren't at fault, I think they expected that we could have done
>>>  something to prevent or minimize the event. Drivers were always taken
>>>  off the road for a day or two and made to have a retraining session with
>>>  another driver after a collision.
>>  
>>  Even if a meteor fell out of the sky and hit the bus? You still have to go
>>  through retraining?
>>  
>>  I absolutely hate bureaucratic nonsense like that.
>>  
> My employers were reasonably sensible people for the most part so I like 
> to think that they wouldn't force a retraining session on a driver if 
> something like a meteor strike happened.
> 
> Then again, my brother - who worked for the same company but drove a 
> minivan instead of a bus - had a flat once. It took many hours for the 
> repair service to come and change out the tire and then he was told he 
> needed a retraining session. I asked why, given the circumstances, and 
> he said he didn't really understand it either. But I don't think he ever 
> actually *did* the retraining session. It was one of the very last days 
> of the school year so it may simply have been lost in the shuffle. Or 
> maybe they realized how silly it was to do a retraining session for that 
> circumstance.
> 
> And that reminds me that I had a flat tire myself once. I ran over a 
> piece of something on the road just before I got to the school and 
> didn't notice anything off but after I'd let the kids off and was doing 
> my child-check (to make sure no one was still on the bus), a teacher 
> crossed the laneway in from of my parked bus and noticed a hissing from 
> the left front tire. He brought that to my attention and I realized that 
> I'd driven over something. Having remembered how long it took someone to 
> come for my brother's flat and being in dire need of a washroom, I 
> decided to drive the bus back to our office - the repair bays are in the 
> same building - because drivers were not permitted to use the school 
> washrooms. I took slower secondary roads rather than the expressway - 
> and got back without incident. However, I was surprised to discover that 
> the damaged tire was not even properly seated on the rim. The bus hadn't 
> ridden oddly with the front left side sagging as I would have thought 
> given the circumstances. I told the mechanics that I probably shouldn't 
> have moved once I knew about the flat and they agreed but I didn't get 
> into any trouble let alone forced to take a retraining session.
> 
>>  When I was a super-secret government agent, the absolute worst thing that
>>  could happen was for you to have a car collision. You could walk down the
>>  street and shoot someone at random and have less paperwork and bureaucratic
>>  hoops to jump through than there was with a minor fender-bender.
>>  
>>  In the aftermath of 9-11, I was assigned as the detail leader for Lauren
>> Bush
>>  (George W's niece) who was a high school student at the time. It was a very
>>  loose detail and we didn't go into the school with her. We sat out in the
>>  parking lot in a car, parked near hers and would pick her up when she left
>>  school each afternoon. She had a panic button that she could push if
>> anything
>>  happened inside the school that would bring us running in.
>>  
>>  So over the course of several months, as I was sitting in my parked car, I
>> was
>>  backed into by high school kids not one, not two, but three different times.
>>  Each bump came with reams of paperwork and repair estimates (even when no
>>  repairs were necessary) and as a bonus on my third incident, I was told I
>> had
>>  take a mandatory driver's education safety course.
>>  
>>  Even though my car was parked in each instance and the engine wasn't even
>>  running. They told me if I'd been standing nearby and the car was empty, it
>>  wouldn't have counted, but because I was inside the car each time when it
>>  happened, then according to the bureaucratic rules, I was presumed to need
>>  re-education.
>>  
>>  Whoever thought forcing people who carry loaded firearms to deal with such
>>  inscrutable and intractable bureaucracy wasn't thinking very clearly.
 
> LOL!
> 
> I'm gonna guess that the paperwork was to cover their asses in case you, 
> or anyone else in the car, developed an injury after the fact - "I 
> thought it was just a bit of whiplash but the doctor says I've got a 
> serious injury" - and limit the government's liability.
> 
> I hear you though: the bureaucracy seems to be able to conjure up 
> mountains of paperwork for circumstances that don't seem to require it.

All it did was teach me the lesson: if it happens again, say you were out
stretching your legs and not in the car, regardless of whether it was true or
not.