http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dis...

transitive verb
: to cause the disappearance of


http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definiti...
[WITH OBJECT] Cause to disappear, as by consumption:
statistics show that the community disappears about 200 pounds of cabbage a year

Yes, I saw those entries. Also one in AHD. Interestingly, Oxford does not have a transitive entry for British English, only for what they call US English.

compare: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definiti...

It still sounds very odd to me and I wondered if I'm the only one.

Is anyone else surprised by this? Have I just been living under a rock...  

Well, I am for one; but I've lived in Germany for many years - not sure that's quite the same as living under a rock though. ;-)

I can't say I've come across it a lot over the years, but on rare occasions ...

The OED has entries for transitive "disappear":

From the second edition (1989):
3. trans. To cause to disappear.

1897 Chem. News 19 Mar. 143 We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron. 1949 Amer. Speech XXIV. 41 The magician may speak of disappearing or vanishing a card.

Draft additions December 2002:

b. trans. euphem. To abduct or arrest (a person), esp. for political reasons, and subsequently to kill or detain as a prisoner, without making his or her fate known.
Freq. with reference to Latin America.
 
[Originally and chiefly after American Spanish desaparecido desaparecido n.]


1979 N.Y. Times Mag. 21 Oct. 66 While Miss Iglesias ‘was disappeared’, her family's writ of habeus corpus, filed on her behalf, was rejected by the courts.

1987 E. Leonard Bandits iii. 37 Our two Nicaraguan doctors were disappeared, one right after the other.

1990 Times 8 Aug. 17/1 Armed men arrive in a village and ‘disappear’ any activists, several of whom have later been found floating in nearby rivers.

1999 Guardian 28 Sept. i. 2 By refusing to tell the families of the 1,198 people who were forcibly disappeared by the Chilean security forces what had happened to their loved ones they were subjecting them to ‘mental pain, suffering and demoralization’.

As far as I recall, I first came across the transitive use as a euphemism in connection with Argentina's "dirty war". There was a lot about it in the media about 10(?) years ago.

It may have happened as a result of the press reporting on the abductions of political opponents by secret police in 20th century totalitarian dictatorships such as Soviet Union and her satellite states, Chile, Argentina etc. Western press may have picked up the local jargon used in reference to such practices when they reported from those places.

Ich (Deutsche in GB) höre den Ausdruck öfter für Menschen, die gewaltsam "verschwinden gelassen" werden, besonders aus politischen Gründen. Zitat aus dem American Heritage Dictionary:

dis·ap·pear (dĭs′ə-pîr) v. dis·ap·peared, dis·ap·pear·ing, dis·ap·pears
v.intr.
1. To pass out of sight; vanish: The moon disappeared behind the clouds.
2. To cease to be seen; be missing or unfound: Her purse disappeared from her locker. The plane disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
3. To cease to exist: Dinosaurs disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
v.tr.
To cause (someone) to disappear, especially by kidnapping or murder.
(https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=d...)

In diesem Sinne habe ich den Ausdruck mehrfach von Amnesty International gehört, anders bisher noch nie. Hier gibt es noch einen Artikel zum Thema: http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.ph... .

Edit: #4-6 waren noch nicht da, als ich diesen Kommentar geschrieben habe - sie beschreiben schon, was ich meinte.

I had this all written once, then LEO *hüstel* disappeared it when my wireless went out, and after I wrote it again I saw that Anne's OED citations already confirm at least part of what I was going to say. But since I've written it, here it is:


To disappear a person was a direct borrowing from Spanish, describing a practice used by dictatorships in Latin American in the guerras sucias (dirty wars) of the 1970s and 80s. In countries such as Argentina and Chile, students, activists, and academics were held and tortured in secret military prisons, then killed in ways that were largely untraceable, mainly by pushing them out of airplanes at height over the ocean. (Their infant children were then often given out for adoption, causing hundreds of family separations that are only beginning to be resolved today with the help of DNA testing.)

So ever since that time, to disappear a person has meant to get rid of them in some vicious and nefarious way. I wouldn't consider that necessarily street slang at all, just an educated familiarity with history, which would fit with Sherlock (the new one).

However, to use that verb transitively for ordinary things, 'as if by consumption,' seems simply wrong, and glaringly so -- in fact, painfully ignorant of the serious, dark nature of the original euphemism. If the transitive sense meaning 'kidnap or kill secretly' is less known in BE, I wonder if Oxford Dictonaries may have just missed the finer points of AE usage again.

Found an old LEO post with some more background information:
related discussion: (to) disappear - verschwinden lassen

It doesn't look, however, as though LEO ever incorporated the suggestion.


EDIT: deleted joke in poor taste

#6 and #7 weren't there when I was finishing mine, but I agree with those dictionary citations for the sense I was referring to as well.

However, we should be clear that, contrary to #6, Chile and Argentina were not Soviet satellites, but anti-Communist dictatorships supported clandestinely by the CIA and other US entities. Kissinger, for example, was asked in a recent interview about his role in some of the coups and their aftermaths. Unsurprisingly, he refused to answer.

However, we should be clear that, contrary to #6, Chile and Argentina were not Soviet satellites,

Of course I didn't mean to suggest that Chile and Argentina were satellite states of the Soviet Union. I thought that was made clear by the comma between "satellite states" and "Chile".

Sorry, maybe I was the one who overlooked the comma, my bad. But I'm not really aware of the term being used for other dictatorships than those in Latin America, at least back then.

Yes, I too had written a response before ##10, 11, only for it "to be disappeared" during "Page can't be displayed" shenanigans.

@hm--us: I don’t think the transitive sense meaning 'kidnap or kill secretly' is less known in BE. It’s just that Oxford Dictionaries Online (is that equivalent to The Concise Oxford?) has a gaping hole in that respect. Other BE dictionaries such as Collins and Chambers carry that meaning.

@Himalia: that political opponents were abducted and never seen again in the Soviet Union or the GDR was common knowledge from Stalin’s time onwards, but was never referred to as their having been “disappeared” to my knowledge. The transitive use of “disappear” in that sense was not used until the last couple of decades of the 20th century and then only in connection with South/Central America, in my experience.

Hier https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1... eine weiter Diskussion zum Thema – mit Verweisen u.a. auf Joseph Hellers "Catch 22".

Ob man sich wohl auch reflexiv-transitiv...? Wenn ja, dann will I now disappear myself. Good night.