Talking Southern No. 100 – It Happened by Accident

     Your compiler got to be nearly fifty years old without ever thinking for even a second about why we say something happened “by accident, versus that it was done “on purpose.”  But then all of a sudden, he started hearing people (mostly very young ones) saying things happened “on accident.”   Google AI, that spoon-feeder of the indolent researcher (a tribe to which your compiler bears charter member credentials) says that, “Because we say ‘on purpose’ rather than ‘by purpose,’ many people intuitively apply this same preposition to ‘accident’ to create a parallel, symmetrical phrase.       

     “Studies show that phrase usage is heavily divided by age.  While older Americans almost exclusively use ‘by accident,’ generations born after 1995 use ‘on accident’ much more frequently, making it a staple of modern vernacular.”  Well blow your compiler down and scoop him back up – he thought it was an example of Northern language making inroads.  Instead, it’s a young versus old thing.   Maybe he ought to change the title of his column to “Talking Old-Timey.” 

    It makes him wonder about two other phrases he’s often heard used interchangeably:   turn off versus shut off.  He does not know that he has ever used the latter of those terms, except maybe in a municipal systems context, as in, “We had to shut off the water supply in Brooks to fix a leaking pipe.”   But shut off the lights, or the radio, or whatever – NEVER!  It’s always been “turn off,” or what your compiler understands is a true Southern usage, “cut off,” as in, “Hey, will you cut off the fan when you leave the room.”

    While Google AI told your compiler that “cut on” and “cut off” are Southern usages for “turn on or off,”  it did not tell him a thing about divisions in age.  Yet when he thinks about it, while he, at age 63, routinely cuts things on and off, he is not sure whether he’s heard anyone much younger say that, so it might be a generational thing, too.

     And while we’re on generational things, one he will never get used to is the tendency of young men to wear hats indoors.  Your compiler remembers when his father, back in the 1960s, would leave for work every morning dressed in suit, tie, and fedora.  But he never put his fedora on till he stepped into the carport, and he only wore it outside.    This was a message he taught his sons, and both of them to this day would rather be caught without a handkerchief than with a hat on indoors.  (Your compiler’s father taught his sons that gentlemen always carry clean handkerchiefs, a habit they both follow to this day, but your compiler digresses.)

     But that lesson seems to your compiler to have fallen on deaf ears among young folks today.  He sees men with hats on inside all the time, and while his immediate tendency is to yank one off whenever he sees it, he manages to control himself and refrain from doing so.  But he still thinks seeing a man inside with a hat on is – where have we heard this term before? – a turn-off.  And he’ll always think that way.