I wonder if anyone would care to comment on this.

We were reading a text that I had prepared in class today. It was about an accident between two cars

In it, there were two phrases which ought to, but don't quite, form a matched pair and I was asked about them.

I had written "driver's side door" and "passenger side door". Notice that the first is a possessive, complete with its possessive apostrophe-s, The second uses the word "passenger" - with no possessive - as part of a compound adjective. Now, I suspect it should have a hyphen but that's not the point. It occurred to me that I always say "driver's side door" and "passenger-side door"

I've done a bit of googling in various spellings and combinations and I've come up with some supportive figures

drivers side (with or without hyphens and apostrophes) 3.6 Million
driver side (with or without hyphens) 6.6 Million
passengers side (with or without hyphens and apostrophes) 0.5 Million
passenger side (with or without hyphen) 9.3 Million

It's not as marked as I'd expected, and it's a bit muddied by the fact that lots of the hits seem to use all possible combinations more or less at random but the very approximate ratios seem to be

drivers:driver = 1:2
passengers: passenger = 1:18

It certainly doesn't appear to be JUST my own personal idiolect. There does seem to be a pattern that passenger (no s) is used far more frequently by comparison to driver (no s).

Has anyone else noticed this? Is there, I wonder, any explanation.

Any comments?

I am a newspaper editor, and I had actually noticed this before, especially in police press releases about accidents.
What I generally do when typesetting the story is call it the "driver side door" and "passenger side door".
This is, however, a conscious move on my part to be consistent, and not an attempt to correct the copy. I do know that I usually say "driver's side door".

The word "accident" is universally used in this context when "collision" would seem to be more accurate.

Especially if Freud is driving!

quote:

Any comments?

Interesting point, Bob. I haven't noticed, but when I first read your post, I thought I'd write "driver's door" and "passenger's door." Maybe not though. I will make it a point to notice.

Would part of the conundrum be that you can have multiple passengers, but only one driver?

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:

Would part of the conundrum be that you can have multiple passengers, but only one driver?

That was one theory suggested but it's exactly the wrong way round for that.

quote:

Originally posted by jerry thomas:
The word "accident" is universally used in this context when "collision" would seem to be more accurate.

You're right there, Jerry. I should have noted that I generally make it "collision" or "incident".
We had an insurance person at one of our editorial seminars who mentioned (if memory serves me correctly) that only about 5 per cent of these incidents are "accidents", which they basically define as a case where none of the drivers involved did anything wrong.

accidents

I always mishear the word as accidence, and, therefore, a grammatical term dealing with inflectional morphology. Likewise, case, for me, is always about a falling away from.

And I always misread "mishear," what with the "sh" and all.