"Elope" from a nursing home?

[Joel S. Berson]

At 11/15/2007 11:25 PM, Charlie Cunningham wrote:
>Try Googleing "elope juvenile placement" and you will find a common,
>specialized usage similar to your nursing home application.  I'm a judge who
>hears dependency cases and it took me a while to get accustomed to this
>usage.

And James Harbeck wrote:
>New to me. They probably decided on that word because they didn't
>like the tone of "escape."

And John McChesney-Young similarly.

This occurred to me later also -- "escape" too vividly conveys the
notion that the "inmate" is "confined" (which of course is true of
these "residents"), and the company of administrators of nursing
homes (and of juvenile "placement" facilities) decided to replace it
with the less negatively-connotative "elope".

Joel

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