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One of the most effective tools employed in service of the human error side of the accident debate is setting up a bogeyman to blame. Norton traces a prime example of this rhetorical tactic in the invention of the word “jaywalker.” He spent years searching the early records of what today we would call the automobile lobby and found that the popularization of the jaywalker as a bogeyman can be traced directly to those desperate to find someone else to blame for the rise of traffic accidents. Before the 1920s, the term “jaywalker” was an uncommon insult, a twin to an insult you have likely never heard: jay-driver. These disses were a call-and-response between a pedestrian and a driver. Each accused the other of being a sort of transportation hillbilly, a “jay” who does not know how to operate on city streets. And for a while, “jaywalker” was a genuine insult. When a New York City police commissioner used it in 1915, it was a serious enough offense that the New York Times wrote an editorial calling the language “truly shocking” and “highly opprobrious.” It is no coincidence that we lost one of these insults to time, while the other entered the lexicon. The automobile lobby marketed, pushed, and popularized the idea of “jaywalking” both as an insult and as law. Today, every state in the nation prohibits jaywalking, and all of them stipulate that if a car strikes a jaywalker, the pedestrian is at fault.