accountability

Built transparently from accountable plus -ity, it names a standing condition rather than an event: one is liable to answer whether or not anyone asks. It takes for the matter answered for and to the party owed an answer, as in Winston Churchill's Sinews of Peace (1946): "an awe-inspiring accountability to the future." Usually uncountable, it still allows the plural accountabilities when separate responsibilities are counted.

Here accountability is something that happens to a person from outside: a reckoning that others demand and enforce. People want it, call for it, or find it missing. Neil Bateman, in Advocacy Skills for Health and Social Care Professionals (2000), notes that levying a charge "will not, by itself, guarantee accountability." Its mirror image is the accepted, good-faith kind, which the responsible person supplies.

Here the responsibility is taken up rather than handed down, so it pairs with verbs of choice: one accepts accountability, or one ducks it. Nigel Harris, writing in RAIL in 2021, says the DfT "consistently ducked accountability." Unlike responsibility imposed by others, this kind rests on willingness. That is why writers speak of it eroding: it fades when people simply stop owning their failings.

A military and governmental term with a narrower job: it attaches to records, not conduct. The officer who holds it must keep exact account of the property, documents or funds in their charge and answer for them. Where the general sense concerns explaining one's actions, here the measure is whether the record matches what is actually held.