Disappeared as transitive

[Jonathan Lighter]

>"What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?"

> "I don't know."

That pretty much sums up the Argentinian situation.

JL

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

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



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