An accident?
Situation: Sal and Tom are office-mates. Sal eats sandwiches for lunch and so often has a loaf of bread in the office. One day, after a period of about a week without any bread in the office, Tom (in uncharacteristic manner) buys a loaf of bread that he intends to use for lunch – but Sal isn’t aware of this. Tom leaves it in the office and goes home. The next day it is gone: Sal took it home. Sal wasn’t able to recall if he had bought any bread recently (in fact he had not), but concluded it must be his because Tom never buys bread.
Question: can anyone (Sal, Tom, or some other individual) characterize what happened as: Sal accidentally took home Tom’s loaf of bread.
Comments(6)
yes.
Certainly. What Sal intended to do was “take home Sal’s loaf of bread.” What Sal actually did was “take home Tom’s loaf of bread.” He did it but he did not intend to do it. Taking home the loaf was not an accident, but taking home the loaf which belonged to Tom was.
And another thing.
Tom gets angry at Sal and attempts to kick him in the ass. But he misses and instead his foot hits Jack’s ass. I can hardly imagine anyone objecting to describing this as, “Tom accidentally kicked Jack,” even though it was no accident that Tom’s foot was flying at ass-kicking speed – the only accident was who the victim ass belonged to. And I think the situations are strongly analogous.
Unless I’m mistaken, the question isn’t if “accidentally” is accurately placed, but if anyone is possessed of enough information to make that statement.
My response: 1. Yes. We can. 2. If someone were to witness both Tom leaving his loaf of bread and Sal taking the loaf of bread, he could, though one wonders why he didn’t bring it up. 3. Either Sal or Tom potentially could if, respectively, the next day either Tom made note of his loaf of bread being missing or Sal made note of the loaf he took home yesterday.
Another issue I see may be the implication that “accidentally” can only be determined with 100% accuracy from the point of view of the one doing the action. In this case, no, because only Sal can say definitively that it was an accident and at this point Sal ostensibly doesn’t know it was Tom’s loaf. But really, “accidentally” almost always implies assumption on the part of the person speaking, so this doesn’t seem to apply.
I’m a definite “yes” on this one; anyone can use that sentence, once they know the circumstances. It seems to me that “accidentally” can cover anything in the predicate (“I accidentally ate pork” could mean that I didn’t realize I was eating something, or that I thought the food was beef but was mistaken, or that I thought the food contained no meat at all but was mistaken–note that the latter two have slightly different (pardon the word) flavors, insofar as in the former, my intent was to eat the thing that is accurately called “pork”, whereas in the latter, I had no intent towards the pork at all).
So, yeah, anything in the predicate. “I accidentally bought tickets on Delta to fly to Atlanta on the 24th”–I didn’t mean to click on “confirm purchase”, I didn’t mean to choose that airline, I didn’t mean for Atlanta to be my destination, I didn’t mean for that to be the date of travel; any of them. And there’s no reason Tom couldn’t use the given sentence–I think it’s fine for him to open a conversation with “Did you accidentally take my loaf of bread?”, meaning “take my loaf, thinking it was yours”.
great tips. I enjoyed reading this