(On Account Of) The "Recent Unpleasantness," or What Happens When You Eat Dinner with Yankees

So I said someone had done something "on accident," and all hell broke loose at the GrinGoat household last night. And they're absolutely right; by all Oxford English Dictionary style standards, it's supposed to be "by accident," as in "After having been offended by Ali's rudeness, it is questionable whether I dropped cyanide in her drink by accident." The clear problem is that there's a non parallel use of the preposition between two situations: you either do things "on purpose" or "by accident," and you shouldn't flip the two. Okay, fair enough.

But the problem, and the reason I'm invoking "The Recent Unpleasantness" (world's best euphemism for the Civil War, for you Yankee dolts) (aka the "War of Northern Aggression") is that upon doing a wee bit of research this morning, I've discovered that "on accident" is a Southern colloquialism. I had NEVER heard anything about the "on accident" / "by accident" distinction until last night, so i figured it was a regional and/or elitist Californian thing, but I wondered if there's an actual reason for the distinction - I'm as much of a grammar policeman as anyone, but I consider the arbitrary choice of a preposition much lower on the general offense scale than, say, the systematically incorrect use of an entire tense (see every TV show in the world w/r/t "if I was"). In my web scroungings, I came across the following post by self-proclaimed English grammar specialist Whit Liggett (who, upon a little further investigation, appears to be a military linguist / interrogator, so I would not mess with this dude in any kind of post-24 viewing circumstances):

****************************************************************

As a specialist in English grammar as well as many other languages, I aver that both are grammatically correct. How? Let me explain…

English, like most languages, makes use of certain implied words because they are superfluous.

For example: “I sent him a letter.”

The preposition “to” is implied as it is not necessary in order to convey the meaning.

I will use a simple sentence to demonstrate this phenomenon as it pertains to our topic.

“I dropped the egg by accident.”

There is an implied phrase that has been intentionally omitted. Including the phrase, we arrive at “I dropped the egg by means of an accident.”

It is equally correct to use “on accident” with a different implied phrase.

“I dropped the egg on account of an accident.”

One simple solution would be to go back to the Latin and just use “via” to convey the meaning.

“I dropped the egg via accident.”

True, it sounds odd, but it is still correct in form. Notice that with this sentence there is an implied “an” omitted before the word “accident.”

********************************************************************
Which actually sort of implies two different meanings of the phrase: "by accident" = by means of an accident = I dropped the egg in an accidental manner (or "my dropping of the egg occurred in a manner which did not involve my explicit intent), whereas "on accident" = on account of an accident = because of an accident = an accident caused me to drop the egg. And given the way we use "accident" in other contexts, like a "cerebral vascular accident," the fact that an accident caused you to drop the egg seems reasonable to me, since if you're really being precise, it is some miscalculation within a biological process that actually results in the dropping of the egg. All of this pointing to the real conundrum, that none of this is what we mean at all - the accident is the event itself, so what we should really say instead of "he did this or that on/by accident" is either "he did that accidentally" or "his doing of that was an accident."

All of which centers on the fact that "on account of" is a decidedly Southern and/or lower class phrase - "We closed the barn doors on account of the coming tornado" - but it's also a reasonably decent substitution for "because of" and one that is used across the country all the time: "The game was called on account of darkness."

So despite my Yankee friends' gasps (and in Ali's case, loud and migraine-inducing shrieks) of horror, I'm just going to embrace my Dixie roots and let the on/by distinction go (though I'll try to use "by" when writing). Cool? In the meantime, I'd be careful and not bring this up around mixed company. Particularly if some of those company happen to be wearing gray uniforms - I wouldn't want there to be any "accidents."