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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The following sentences are taken from a university student’s essay on King Lear. I thought at first that perhaps the student hadn’t proofread his work. Then I realized that he meant what he had written since he used the same incorrect term three times in the space of four pages. I suppose being banished is rather like vanishing, though, right?
“Lear was furious and vanished Cordelia. Although he vanished
Cordelia, and therefore the kingdom was divided into two, the
staged love test shows how truly fair and sincere Lear was
originally attempting to be” (p.1)
“After Lear was already vanished from her kingdom, she explains
her doubts about her father” (p.3)
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Is the student a Spanish-as-a-first-language speaker, by chance? The B-V consonent is pretty much the same in Spanish.
It is pretty interesting, regardless, since if you banish someone, he or she vanishes. To “vanish” someone reminds me of the first time I heard disappear as a transitive verb (to disappear someone, meaning kidnap or otherwise take someone away permanently). Because of that, perhaps, to “vanish” someone seems a little more chilling or ominous than just banishing him or her.
Last edited by JonW719 (2008-04-23 15:17:18)
Feeling quite combobulated.
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Nice find. It looks like a pretty legitimate eggcorn.
I was really surprised that we haven’t documented this one before. There’s nothing in the database or the forum as far as I can tell.
Let’s see if we can dig up some more examples from the web. This one should be relatively easy to track down.
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In response to JonW719, I wish I could report that this was an ESL issue, but alas, it was not. Still, I find the Spanish-speaking V/B issue interesting. As for “to disappear [someone],” isn’t that something from 1984? Or, does it just seem like something Orwell would have written. . .? Either way, I agree that “to vanish [someone]” does sound even more frightening than “to banish [someone]”!
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My sense is that that chilling transitive use of “to disappear” had its start in 1970s Argentina. The military government clandestinely kidnapped thousands of political dissidents and murdered them. The missing became known as “los desaparecidos.”
This sense of “to disappear” showed up in the OED just six years ago, but the citations show it’s been in use in English since the 70s:
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; cf. American Spanish desaparecido DESAPARECIDO n. (lit. ‘those who have been disappeared’), which posits a passive transitive use of the usually intransitive Spanish verb desaparecer, evoking an action performed on another but disguised as autonomous.
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’.
Pity the poor New York Times Magazine, with its misspelling of “habeas corpus” enshrined for posterity in the first OED example above. But who knows, maybe they were merely quoting the misspeller….
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B/V confusion isn’t that uncommon for kids, though—my next-door neighbor kid came back from a trip to the Iowa State Fair all excited about a trip to the <a href=http://www.blueribbonfoundation.org/cgi-bin/brfrendetails.pl?1170452907>Buried Industries Building </a>
I think “vanished/banished” is a strong eggcorn. If you are banished, you go away, right? You don’t seek to exist, you just go out of sight. (er, out of site? ;-) )
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TootsNYC, when you say “You don’t seek to exist” above, what are you picturing that to mean? I see other examples of that usage but I don’t know if they’re just mis-typings. (I would normally say “cease to exist”)
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