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Should ‘go missing’ just vanish?

June 21, 2009|Jan Freeman

In the 10 years since I first fielded readers’ complaints about the phrase go missing, the British import has continued to spread in American English. It has also continued to irk some people: Grammar Girl, for instance, called it her audience’s peeve of the year for 2008. She added this advice to journalists: “Went missing actually isn’t wrong, but it annoys a lot of Americans, so you might want to say {hellip} disappeared every once in a while.”

And so we do; in fact, we say it a lot. When Air France’s flight 447 went down in the Atlantic a few weeks ago, disappeared was by far the most popular verb to describe its fate, with vanished a not-very-close second and went missing a distant third. That choice might have been influenced by the common phrase “disappeared from the radar,” but the rankings are the same in non-radar contexts. Mr. Verb did a quick tally a couple of weeks ago, and reported the results on his website: “Overall, disappeared is roughly 20x more common than gone/went missing, and in the last month it’s almost 30x more common.”

Of course, go missing is still young, compared to its rival verbs. It has only achieved its modest popularity in the past few decades; it could conceivably keep gaining on the competition.

But I’m guessing it will occupy its own, semi-separate niche in the medium-to-long run. From the beginning, I’ve liked the no-nonsense simplicity of go missing; by comparison, disappear and vanish both seem more strange and spooky, probably because they can be used to describe abstractions and immaterial phenomena - things that don’t just get lost but actually cease to exist. The age of chivalry can disappear, a rainbow can vanish, but neither is said to go missing; something that has gone missing is usually still presumed to exist, somewhere.

I asked Lynne Murphy, an American-born linguist and blogger who teaches in England, for her impressions of how go missing is used in its native land. She too believes that using go missing “makes an event seem less mysterious than ‘disappear’ or ‘vanish,’ which somehow have a whiff of the supernatural about them.”

Even Ben Yagoda, who denounced Americans’ fondness for British terms in a 2004 essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, gave go missing a free pass. It was more down-to-earth, he found, than disappear or its “slightly more melodramatic counterpart, ‘vanish.’ ”

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