h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A big debate at work.

Some of us feel the expression "a near miss" is incorrect in its usage as indicating an accident that didn't happen, you either miss or hit, if you come close to missing you actual hit. "A near accident" is a better phrase.

Anyone else want to comment?

CH

"Accidents" are usually the result of a chain of unrelated occurences or failures.

Look at a simple car crash, there are so many factors involved (weather conditions, road surface, tyre conditions, braking efficiency, speed, reaction times, driver alertness, etc) together with a need for something to crash into.

Suggesting that you can somehow quantify how close you came to having an accident seems pointless unless you are to use that information to reduce the possibility of an accident occuring in the future. For example by driving more slowly and/or more carefully.

It may be grammatically incorrect, but I think it's a phrase that has a standard meaning in the field of piloting and air-traffic control - can't remember the exact figures but a 'near miss' is when two aircraft get closer than 1,000 feet vertically or 1 mile horizontally (I could be completely wrong with the figures)

I just want to say something in Danish "Det er bedre at ramme ved siden af end slet ikke at ramme."

Near miss = near hit is more like it I think.

I think Billy Connoly had something to say on this subject once but I've forgotten what he said

Yes, I agree with the subject.
Near miss seems to be short for 'nearly missed'. Which means *hit*.

Ben Elton also used to have a bit of a rant/sketch about the same thing.

Oh yeah, it was Ben Elton, not Billy Connoly

Darn, I really like that Danish saying.

But shouldn't a near miss more be used for those situations where someone find out they are going to hit something, and almost avoids it?

"Near miss" is grammatically correct. If you don't hit a target you miss it. That miss can be close to or far from the target. A near miss is a miss which is close to the target, a wide miss is one which is far away. I'm not a liguistics expert, but someone who is could tell us exactly what the grammatical structure is in terms of conjunctions, participles, accusatives, etc, of "near miss" meaning avoided each other, and "near miss" meaning a miss which was close to the target. Clear as mud? I thought so

I think it's the *usage* of the phrase which is causing the problem here. "Near miss" implies that you were trying to hit the target, which obviously isn't the case where two aircraft are concerned. "Near hit" would be be correct usage for that circumstance.

I have a horrible feeling Gosho was talking about me Firstly, just on the word 'miss' itself, there is no implication of intention whatsoever in the word itself, you can quite easily miss hitting something without even knowing it was there. I think that's a fairly important point because when you start talking usage as ooposed to meaning (pragmatics as opposed to semantics) you're asking for thousands of variations. That being the case I'll stick to semantics and syntax, meaning and structure.

"Nearly missed" (or the rarer present/future tense "Nearly miss") clearly mean that a 'hit' has been/will be acheived, whether that was the intention or not. "Near miss", on the other hand, does not. Taken as a stand-alone phrase, rather than as part of a sentence, "miss" is the head noun and "Near" is its adjective. Hence, "Near" is describing "miss", qualifying the type of miss that it is.

That treatment assumes that we are talking about 'hit' and 'miss' in terms of colliding and not colliding. This being the English language which is being discussed, it is not a rock-solid analysis and put into different contexts would likely yield contradictory results. In this context, of for example "There was a near miss on the M42 highway tonight" the analysis is as stated above; indeed, the phrase used to (and sometimes still is) written as near-miss, to emphasise the connection between the two.

Then again, if you ever watch cricket you may, after an unsuccesful LBW appeal, hear a commentator say "Well Bill, that looked pretty adjacent to me." where 'adjacent' is used to mean 'directly in line' as opposed to its more usual meaning of 'next-to'

*Faints*

::THUD::

'Near miss' is simply adjective + noun. I think the confusion arises because 'to nearly miss' (adverb + verb) means pretty much exactly the opposite, but that's the language's fault, and not that of whoever coined 'near miss'.

There is a better example of a word being used in an utterly counter-intuitive sense in this context, and that is the word 'intercept' as used by the US Army in reference to the Patriot missile system when used in the Gulf War. When the Army said the Patriot intercepted 80% of Scuds and thus had an 80% success rate, a normal person could have been forgiven for thinking that Patriots destroyed four out of five incoming missiles. President Bush (senior) certainly did, which is why he went on to use this 'proof' that the technology worked to persuade Congress to fund the National Missile Defense program. Unfortunately, the US Army had decided that the word meant something else: an intercept was deemed to have occurred if the Patriot missile reached its programmed intercept point (i.e. the place in the sky where it was supposed to hit the Scud), and the incoming missile caused no significant ground damage. In other words, the Patriot could be deemed successful without actually hitting its target as long as the Scud didn't hit anything the Saudi government couldn't keep from the press.

logical

Near Miss = Somewhere in the vicinity is a female

*continuing on with *
Is a Miss as good as a Mister?

*sheepishly*

Oh how I luuurve to be near ewe!

You're soooooo baaaaaaaaaaad!

Certainly in Health and Saftey law, an accident which would have caused injury but in which injury was narrowly avoided (ducking as something fell across your work place for example, it regarded as an accident and is reported as such just as it would have been if injury had occured.