[Ads-l] antedating trans. "disappear,"

[Jonathan Lighter]

My educated guess is that Heller coined the usage and that _Catch-22_ was
the source of its currency. The characters don't have a clear idea of what
being "disappeared" means. Somebody simply overheard sinister figures
planning to do it to Dunbar.

The 1922 outlier may not suggest anything beyond whisking somebody away.

Cf.  the magicians' use of transitive "vanish."

JL

On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 5:26 AM ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> > Heller's characters were being "disappeared" by army authorities. Hence
> (I
> > believe) the currency of the term.
>
> JL: Your Heller citation is wonderful, and if Heller heard it during
> WWII it suggests that the following OED note may be faulty:
> "Originally and frequently with reference to Latin America." Also,
> your 1922 citation illuminates the evolution of the verb.
>
> The first OED citation for transitive "disappear" is this:
>
> [Begin OED citation]
> 1897 We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron.
> Chemical News 19 March 143
> [End OED citation]
>
> The citation below discusses a magic trick, and it contains the phrase
> "the ball will be disappeared" which suggests to me that "disappear"
> was being treated as a transitive verb in 1883. However, the context
> contained a complaint that the phrase was written "with indifferent
> correctness".
>
> Date: January 1883
> Periodical: The National Schoolmaster
> Quote Page 5,
> Publisher: John Heywood, Manchester, England
>
> https://books.google.com/books?id=XrMEAAAAQAAJ&q=%22be+disappeared%22#v=snippet&
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> Certain playthings are brought out with directions attached in three
> different languages, German, French, and English. The German is
> tolerable, but the French and English are written "with indifferent
> correctness."
>
> There is the interesting deception of the "box and ball" trick. The
> happy English child is told to "show to the company the ball's
> counterfeit close de box, and in opening the same the ball will be
> disappeared."
> [End excerpt]
>
> Maybe Bill Mullins can find early examples in the literature about magic.
>
> Garson
>
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>


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