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

[Charles Doyle]

As I recall the episode, Yossarian said something like, "They can't disappear him! It's ungrammatical." But the next day the person had been disappeared. (Was it The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice? Yossarian, who has feigned seeing-everything-twice syndrome, now fears being disappeared himself, and he shouts, "I see everything once!")

Or so I seem to remember--many years later . . . .

--Charlie
_______________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 14:31:38 -0500
>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject: Re: v. tr. "suicide" [and "disappear"]
>>
>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.
>
>LH

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