this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Fuck Cars

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Hate how the BBC always use passive voice for car crashes. No mention that a driver is at fault.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

100% agree that it's horrible wording, but the linguistics nerd inside my brain just has to say: that's not the passive voice.

Passive voice would be something like "a store was smashed into" or "a car was driven into the store", where the grammatical subject is the semantic object. It can be used to avoid saying the subject of the sentence, who's doing the action, but in this case they keep the active voice and just change the subject from a "driver" to a "car".

On another note, it's also telling that the article first comments on financial damage, then that the driver is unhurt and the car is damaged, and only after that does it say that the store-owner and the two customers were unharmed.