go missing

[Wilson Gray]

As the police commissioner of [Something] Blue, I think it was, might
have said, "[The constant use of 'go missing' on the police dramas of
today] _really frosts my balls_!" (I have no idea how this got past
the censors in the '70's), but I've never thought of it as
"ungrammatical," only as an unnecessary borrowing from BritSpeak.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain





On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Arnold Zwicky<zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â go missing
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> it's astonishing how much passion this idiom raises in americans.
> we've seen Robert Hartwell Fiske's contempt for it. Â it was Grammar
> Girl's Pet Peeve of 2008 --
>
> Â  grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/went-missing.aspx
>
> and there are no doubt many other word ragings around. Â 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):
>
> Â  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?). Â this last criticism is leveled against most innovations,
> but i've never really understood it. Â 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
>
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