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Advocates want you to stop saying "shark attacks" and call them "negative encounters"

Great white shark attack
Great white shark attack
Getty Images

We can no longer call them "shark attacks" because from now on, they are "negative encounters."

That's the dream for a group of shark experts and advocates in Australia, who say that is a "bad" term and not "accurate."


University of Sydney language researcher Christopher Pepin-Neff told the Sydney Morning Herald that the term "shark attack" is a "lie," and argued that a majority of what people call "attacks" are merely nips and minor injuries from smaller sharks.

Instead, these advocates would prefer if you called these incidents"shark interactions," or even "negative encounters."

The advocates also maintain that in the early 1900s, people used to call them "shark accidents," and the term "attack" didn't really become commonplace until the 1930s.

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