Is aborted

[Federico Escobar]

You're right, searching that way does yield some hits. But you're also right
in the grim scenarios that crop up. Better to take note of that sort of
passive and move on.

F.



On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Is aborted
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12:02 PM -0400 1/2/11, Federico Escobar wrote:
> >Not a pleasant first post of the year, but one particular use of the verb
> >"abort" caught my attention.
> >
> >This was posted on a Facebook discussion, and nobody made a comment on it:
> >"I am not giving her until she is aborted and fixed."
> >
> >The poster referred to a dog who got pregnant by accident. One could think
> >it means that the dog herself must be aborted (i.e., her life terminated).
> >What the person means is that the dog must be subjected to an abortion
> >(i.e., her puppies must be aborted).
> >
> >It's difficult to separate this particular passive from other,
> well-settled
> >examples of "is aborted" (e.g., "Dialogue is aborted"). I ran a search of
> >"is aborted" on the COCA and came up with no examples that were similar to
> >the one I quoted.
> >
> One way of finding (or not finding) relevant hits is by searching on
> "I was aborted".  Granted, this isn't perfect, since it mostly picks
> up cases of "I wish I was aborted" and cases of "I was aborted at 7
> 1/2 months and lived!", where the ordinary passive is involved, and
> it won't include relevant instances of dogs on whom abortions were
> performed except for talking dogs, but it does pick up a couple of
> cases like this one:
>
> ==========
> i was aborted 3 weeks ago!
>
> apparently i was pregnant for 8 weeks suddenly was aborted and after
> that i still have blood from the day of abortion until now i till
> blood its been past 3 weeks after my abortion
> ==========
> I'd look for more, but for various reasons the search is pretty awful.
>
> LH
>
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