The current obsession with "Gone Missing"

[Wilson Gray]

IMC, I associate the phrase with reading stories / books written in
Britspeak and seeing movies using that dialect. My impression is that
I've been familiar with if for four or five dekkids. As long as it was
confined to BritSpeak, I was totally indifferent to it. But its
continuing destruction of the colloquial integrity of AmerSpeak is
something up with which I will not put! :-) Uh, I mean, like, if I had
any choice in the matter, that is, of course. :-)

-Wilson

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: The current obsession with "Gone Missing"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I can't say when I first heard/read "gone missing." Â For some reason I
> associate it with missing ships during WWII.
>
> Sounds fine to me. Â If it really is running riot in the media (maybe so,
> maybe not), I suspect one reason may be that it's shorter than "reported
> missing." Â It also avoids the passive voice, one of the top taboos of
> second-rate writers. Â Finally, it sounds (at least to me) a little spooky:
> it seems to emphasize (maybe through greater concision and the suggestion of
> motion) that the thing/person really, really should be there. But isn't.
>
> JL
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
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>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
>> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: The current obsession with "Gone Missing"
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Jun 7, 2009, at 5:53 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>
>> > At 6/7/2009 07:47 AM, Robert Hartwell Fiske wrote:
>> >> "Gone" or "went" missing is dreadfully popular today. Everyone from
>> >> reporters on "CNN" to detectives (or their writers) on "Without a
>> >> Trace" now prefer
>> >> it.
>> >
>> > Did it become prevalent in English at the time of the "disappeared"
>> > of South American dictatorships?
>>
>> no. Â see my previous postings. Â its spread in the U.S. seems to be
>> relatively recent, though.
>>
>> joel then goes on to say some sensible things about meaning and to
>> express doubts about Fiske's claim that "go missing" is driving out
>> the alternatives. Â i too doubt this. Â i suspect that this impression
>> (and the idea that there is a "current obsession" with the expression)
>> is an instance of the frequency illusion: people notice most of the
>> occurrences that come past them (because the idiom strikes them as
>> odd) and don't notice occurrences of the alternatives.
>>
>> arnold
>>
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--
-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

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