I wonder if it has anything to do with the way "an" sounds when spoken with an American accent. A mishearing and then repetition of "an accident" seems much more plausible to me than confusion with "on purpose".
"I lent a pen off him", "he lent me a pen". Could be a Northern thing though.
One I noticed in popular use a few years ago (Canada): the word "itch" as a verb, i.e.: "I itched it" "he was itching himself"
Sounds odd to me.
(So I just asked my employees - who are somewhat younger than me. They had heard of it, claimed not to use it, and believed it was poorly educated people with a poor grasp of English who used it in their experience.)
http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/33544/what-is-the-dif...
What also bothers me that I've heard out of many British people, but never yet a Canadian or American is 'can I lend that thing from you?'... you can't lend something from its owner. As the lender, you are the owner of the property to be lent. Thus you can lend something to someone or borrow it from them, but you can't borrow it to someone or lend it from someone.
That said, I think our dialects are merging, (well more likely British English is becoming Americanised, but you guys make all the tv, so that's to be expected), for example, when I was younger no one said "ass", it was always "arse", but nowadays it's nearly always "ass"; except for the older generations.
But, we have the same problem within the UK, in the north, we have three meals, breakfast, dinner and tea. In the south they have breakfast, lunch and dinner. It can be very confusing, especially in films when someone invites someone round for tea, but there's no food and it's 1pm!
At the time I assumed he was just one of those uneducated redneck hillbillies I'd heard of who can't English proper. But it turns out that's just how young people speak these days.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=poo%2Cpoop&yea...
It's "poop" because when you say that word, your lips make the same motions that your nether region makes while doing it.
The same is true of the phrase "explosive diarrhea".
"on accident" is a pre-prepared behavior that will be employed when an accident occurs in the future.
"by accident" is metadata accompanying an event, reporting the author or agent that created the event.
ON ACCIDENT GOTO EMERGENCYROOM"I knocked over the glass on accident."
"I broke your mug on accident", at the fifth word, the listener/reader thinks the other person is about to say "on purpose", but suddenly they say "on accident". Hence it's funny, reduces the tension about them breaking your mug.
Does "on accident" even make sense? The preposition "on" in this case implies intent, so who is causing accidents on purpose? And if you are, then it's not really an accident, it's sabotage.
But it'll always sound wrong to me.
Actually most of the comments about it say that their children picked it up in elementary school. Given the wide and sudden spread I suspect that this can be traced back to some children's TV show or classroom video.
And I remember the first time I heard an American say "I'm really pissed!" and my mate said, "what have you been drinking?"
I won't even mentions the confusion when an American lady mentioned that she had a sore fanny.
I do recall amusement when learning German, attempting to say I travelled 'on' the bus, only for it to literally mean on the roof of the bus.
Perhaps it evolved from "accidentally on purpose", which was a pretty 90's expression.
> why did the new form suddenly edge out the old in the mid-1990s?
Based on the fact that the years listed in the first section were the birth-years of the speakers, I would guess that the main cultural transition actually took place around 2000-2005, when speakers born after 1995 would be developing their dialects.
I suppose it could be argued that the shift must have happened earlier based on the mixed usage among speakers born as early as 1970, but at any rate, the complete takeover seems to have happened around the millennium change.
(Google books link, but the PDF is available widely)
https://books.google.no/books?id=CPKHKvge3Z4C&lpg=PA379&ots=...