accidental And random both can mean “something happens by chance”, but usage suggests that “accidentally” also implies an element of carelessness or inattention while “random” implies the incident will happen with or without attention or concern.
From accident And problem often confused, and for good reason. They have intersecting histories, both stemming from the same basic Latin root, cadetmeans “to fall” and their Latin antecedents mean the same thing: accidental means, among other things, “fall down” and “happen” and problem means “to fall on” and (also) “to happen.” Plus, they sound similar.
Ted’s wheelbarrow accident was a pretty memorable one.
Share the source of chance and randomness
Both accident And problem formed from the present participle of Latin verbs (they can roughly translate as “accidental” and “incident”); became nouns in French before transitioning to English in the 14th century. The German equivalent of “accident” would be happengive us some perspective on how to understand the original meaning of accident: verb happen is defined as “to happen especially as if by fate” and obsolete noun happen defined in Oxford English Dictionary is “a case, circumstance, incident, accident.” The oldest meaning of accident is “a random event” or “something unforeseen and unplanned”—can also be described as “something that is happening” or “about to happen.”
Accident And problem share the idea of a sudden and unpleasant event, the former usually referring directly to something that caused damage or injury, the latter referring to a particular time or instance of the incident. unpleasant or illegal:
traffic accident
isolated problem reported
Distinctive meaning
The next words go their own way. Problem become more abstract in diplomatic language, referring to something that can have diplomatic consequences:
a border problem
Accident has a distinct abstract meaning referring to any random or unnecessary property, event or circumstance:
ONE accident born
Among its more specific meanings is an overly specific use of euphemisms when referring to infant and pet behavior:
The puppy had a accident on the floor.
Subtle difference
Their related adjectives stay pretty much in their lane: accidental refers to something that happens by chance (opportunity another word derived from cadet), but sometimes also implies inattention or carelessness:
ONE accidental discover
time is accidental
ONE accidental fire
Random means “small” or, when it means “accidental” or “without intention or calculation,” has no idea of carelessness. (Problem also sometimes used as an adjective in technical or legal contexts.)
random expense
play one random role
ONE random Detect
Languages sometimes evolve in unpredictable and illogical ways. Parallel noun forms morbidity rate And accident has a very unbalanced use of comparison, with morbidity rate a fairly common word meaning “occurrence or rate of occurrence” (as in “a high morbidity rate of crime”) and accident a rare thing, mentioning only “part of grammar related to inflection.”
So it can be said that all the irregular verb tenses to keep in mind when learning a new language are “unforeseen or unplanned” changes in the course of a language—those incidents occur in the history of a language.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
