Incident | Vocabulary

- Hey, wordsmiths. Let me introduce you to a spectacular new word. It's, oh. Oh dear. There's been an incident. This manatee has taken several bites out of the word spectacular. (sighs) Well, fine. We are nothing if not flexible here at Khan Academy. So let us instead pivot to the word incident itself. Incident. It's a noun. And it means an unforeseen and usually bad thing that happens, like a manatee taking several bites out of my vocabulary word. Thanks pal. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but hey, at least I can be the bearer of good word origins, huh? Huh? Come on. Incident comes from the Latin incidere, which means to fall upon or to happen. And we can break that into two parts, in, which means in or on, and cidere, which means to fall. So an incident is an event that fell upon you or happened. Now, normally this is the part of the video where I ask you to come up with some similar sounding words and we will get to that, but I wanted to head off some confusion. Cidere different from caedere, which means to kill, and shows up in words like homicide or pesticide, right? To killing a person or killing pests or killing a bug. Different words. So when we look for words that share a root with incident, they'll typically be pronounced cid instead of cide. Anyway, let's do the thing. You've got 10 seconds to come up with words that use the prefix in, or the root cid. I'll put on some music. (groovy music) Here are some words I came up with. Accident, a chance happening, an unexpected mistake. Coincidence, right? Which is when two or more things happen at once without having been planned, coincident, things happening together, and inspect, which is to look at something carefully. Looking in. Let's use incident in a sentence, because I think that'll get across its bad news connotation. Sadly, the incident in the library destroyed all the books. It was a bummer to lose all those books. An unfortunate thing happened. Incident can also sometimes be a euphemism. A way of saying something ugly happened without having to name it. Note that I'm saying the incident and not the fire, or the horrific cotton candy machine malfunction. This would, as it happens, also be really bad for all the books. Ah, okay wordsmiths. I have to go. There's been an incident. (thunder roaring) I think the manatee is back and it's still hungry. I'll catch you all next time, huh? You can learn anything, David out.