Incidents, Incidence and Instances

Malapropism* isn't always wildly extravagant. Frank Swinnerton in his autobiography wrote of the publisher J M Dent's tendency to confuse words. "Heavens, how my taste was vitiated !" he once remarked. He meant 'vindicated'. I like too the example given in the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: 'dancing the flamingo'. A book by a well-known historian refers to burials in a churchyard as 'internment'. That could be a typesetter's misprint, of course. But there are other commoner words that are easily confused.

An article by a person who shall remain nameless, writing recently in a journal that shall also remain nameless, mentions "people who want to criticise [a certain person's] use of blusher or express their indignation at some incidence of the use of the word tits . . ."

Now 'incidence' is an abstract noun meaning the rate or frequency of some phenomenon - such as the average number of earthquakes that occur in Australia in a hundred years, or the percentage of earwigs that are born lame. The notion of 'some incidence' can't be right: the term 'instance' is required here.

We have often seen in print, or heard on TV or Radio, of 'unfortunate incidences', where the writer/speaker really means 'incidents', and, possibly confusing the two with 'instances', assume
that 'incidences' is the smarter term to use.

* Malapropism is a term coined from the fictional name of a character (Mrs Malaprop) in Richard Sheridan's eighteenth century play The Rivals. She spoke of an 'allegory on the banks of the Nile', and used the word 'contagious' when she meant 'contiguous'. The name Sheridan gave her is an amalgam of the Latin stem 'mal-' = bad and the E word 'appropriate' (itself derived from Latin)

Incidents, Incidence and Instances