v. tr. "suicide" [and "disappear"]

[Jonathan Lighter]

You mean Oxford didn't know that? Everybody knows that.

  JL

Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Jesse Sheidlower
Subject: Re: v. tr. "suicide" [and "disappear"]
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On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 02:31:38PM -0500, Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 12:10 PM -0500 3/1/07, Charles Doyle wrote:
> >Wouldn't transitive "suicide" have to be either redundant or ironic?
> >
> >--Charlie
>
> Somehow it reminds me of transitive "disappear", also a causative, as
> ultimately borrowed from the Spanish (in reference to putative
> left-wingers who were made to disappear by the right-wing juntas of
> Chile, Argentina, et al.). I recall an earlier possibly nonce
> occurrence in _Catch-22_, when someone, probably Yossarian, objects
> to the threat that someone would disappear him by arguing that
> "disappear" isn't a transitive verb.

Transitive _disappear_ is found several times in the text of
_Catch-22_. Thanks for calling our attention to this!

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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