Disappeared as transitive

[Jonathan Lighter]

One wonders if later English usage came straight from Catch-22, with no
Spanish influence at all.

I was surprised to see that OED does not include the Heller cite.

JL

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Disappeared as transitive
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thank you for that.
>
> The OED says that the origin is "desaparecido." It's an odd jump to go
> from a foreign noun (derived in Spanish from a past participle adjective)
> to a verb. Could it a translation of something like "he was a desaparecido"
> to "he was a disappeared" or "they were desaparecidos" to "they were
> disappeared," which then wound up being reanalyzed as passive in English?
>
> The reason for the quotation marks still seems murky. It seems odd for a
> newspaper to go out of the way to include a word that they judge to require
> quotation marks.
>
> Benjamin Barrett
> Seattle, WA
>
> On Mar 17, 2013, at 6:08 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> wrote:
>
> > OED has transitive "disappear" from 1897, and it has the relevant sense
> with
> > reference to Latin American political abductions (after Sp.
> "desaparecido")
> > from 1979. I reproduced the citations in this Language Log post:
> >
> > http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3652
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >>
> >> Heller used this near the end of Catch-22, IIRC. That would have been in
> >> 1961.
> >>
> >> It was popularized, possibly via a parallel inspiration in Spanish,
> during
> >> the military dictatorship in Argentina.
> >>
> >> On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 7:36 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> >>
> >>> The election of Argentinean cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as papa has
> =
> >>> brought Argentina's dirty war into the news.
> >>>
> >>> Twice I've seen "disappeared" used as a transitive verb in quotes in
> the =
> >>> Seattle Times without any explanation or reason. It seems more
> difficult =
> >>> to use "disappear" this way and add the quotes than to say "make
> someone =
> >>> disappear," so I'm puzzled by this use. An example can be seen in the =
> >>> Washington Post as well =
> >>> (
> >>>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/vatican-defends-pope-francis-a=
> >>>
> gainst-argentina-dirty-war-allegations/2013/03/15/d4a11e3c-8d90-11e2-9f54-=
> >>> f3fdd70acad2_story.html)
> >>>
> >>> -----
> >>> But questions about the activities of Bergoglio from 1976 to 1983,
> when =
> >>> a military dictatorship terrorized much of Argentina and
> =93disappeared=94=
> >>> thousands of its own citizens, remain a cloud over his papacy=92s =
> >>> otherwise bright early days.
> >>> -----
> >>>
> >>> I assume this comes from Spanish. Here again, though, nobody is being =
> >>> quoted, either in Spanish or Latin.
> >>>
> >>> Wiktionary claims a transitive meaning of "disappear" =
> >>> (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disappear) with a 1973 Heller
> citation, =
> >>> and provides desaparecer as the Spanish translation (though =
> >>> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/desaparecer#Spanish doesn't provide a =
> >>> transitive meaning, it could just be incomplete).
> >>>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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