"abscond with" 'steal'

[Laurence Urdang]

It is hard to understand the fuss.
  Abscond means 'to steal away; sneak off.'
  If one takes something him, he absconds with the loot, money, etc.  The meaning of abscond has not changed.
  Def. 3 appears to be derived from the second sense as a not uncommon result of creating a transitive verb out of an intransitive.
  Where or whether a usage is documented in a dictionary is irrelevant.
  L. Urdang


"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: "abscond with" 'steal'
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while rooting through various usage dictionaries and manuals for
examples of Omit Needless Words and Include All Necessary Words, my
current intern, rachel cristy, came across the "abscond" entry in
Garmer's Modern American Usage, where garner notes

1. the intransitive verb. OED2: ‘To hide oneself; to retire from
the public view: generally used of persons in debt, or criminals
eluding the law.’ J.; to go away hurriedly and secretly.

2. an intransitive verb in combination with "with + NP": "While
_abscond_ is often followed by _with_ to indicate a taking, and
especially a stealing, the word itself has no such meaning."

3. a transitive verb with the meaning of #2 ("... the Chinese
government is going to _abscond_ [read _take_] about 97 percent of
his paycheck..."); this garner labels a misuse.

uses #2 and 3 were new to me, and they aren't in OED Online or AHD4
or NOAD2, but you can google up plenty of examples of each.

garner clearly rejects #3. his attitude towards #2 is harder to
divine. he recognizes that the 'take, steal' use of "abscond with"
is common (which might be taken as an admission that the language has
changed -- by reinterpretation of "X absconded with Y" 'X fled,
taking Y along' as involving "with" as a mere marker of the
complement of "absconded", which denotes the thing taken), but then
says that "the word *itself* has no such meaning" (which could be a
disparagement of use #2, or could just be a recognition that
"abscond" has the 'steal' meaning only in combination with "with").

no entry in MWDEU.

arnold

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