go missing

[Arnold Zwicky]

it's astonishing how much passion this idiom raises in americans.
we've seen Robert Hartwell Fiske's contempt for it.  it was Grammar
Girl's Pet Peeve of 2008 --

   grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/went-missing.aspx

and there are no doubt many other word ragings around.  here are some
comments on Crawford Kilian's posting about it on his Ask the English
Teacher blog (Kilian is U.S.-born, but has lived in Canada since 1967;
he noted that "go missing" is absolutely ordinary in the UK and Canada
-- compare Lynne Murphy's comment):

   http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/english/2005/08/went_missing.html

Went missing has been bothering me ever since I first heard it on TV.
UK or Canadians can have it. In our country it's incorrect and it will
never sound proper.

Posted by: Elaine Tustin | April 28, 2006 at 08:38 AM

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who thinks this phrase is
poor grammar. Every time I hear it on TV, radio or read it in printed
form, I email the source and tell them what I think of the phrase. I
hope it doesn't become an accepted part of our language.

Posted by: Philip Aggen | May 01, 2006 at 09:27 AM

Thank you for explaining this phrase. Everytime I hear it, it sounds
like someone is scratching their fingernails on a blackboard!

Posted by: Terri | May 30, 2006 at 10:46 PM

Like many people, I am irritated by the use of the phrase "went
missing" because it is a degradation of the English language. When I
hear a reporter use the phrase, I note the time and the story. When I
am on the computer, I e-mail the news program and express my objection
to this phrase. I would encourage others to do the same and maybe we
can keep this ignorant phrase off the TV news.

Posted by: Philip Aggen | January 19, 2007 at 07:36 AM

.....

the ragers judge the expression to be recent (not so -- OED2 has a
1948 cite, and i suspect that it goes back before that); ungrammatical
(well, it's an idiom, and its meaning is not compositional; and it's
not an instance of the go-Ving construction, as in "we went hunting",
though some critics seem to expect it to be); and unnecessary (we
already have ways of "saying the same thing", so why introduce
another?).  this last criticism is leveled against most innovations,
but i've never really understood it.  surely it's good to have several
ways of "saying the same thing", and the variants almost always are
differentiated in use in one way or another (subtly in semantics, or
in style or whatever).

a few critics appreciate that the expression was originally british,
and so condemn it as an affectation.

arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org