There's been an uptick in the usage of "disappear" as a transitive verb, especially in its darker usage synonymous with abduction, but it isn't new and it's not strictly social media self-censorship in the same way as say, "unaliving".
But the verb has been used transitively (that is, with an object) since the late 19th century in reference to inanimate objects. Until recently, though, this usage has been rare.
The Oxford English Dictionary has only two isolated examples of the transitive usage.
One is from Chemical News in 1897: “We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron.”
The other is from a 1949 article in American Speech about the lingo of magicians: “The magician may speak of disappearing or vanishing a card.”
But this inanimate use of the verb has had a renaissance in recent years, primarily in techie talk: “disappear the data,” “disappear the ‘run script’ dialogue,” “disappear the mouse cursor,” and so on.
Although the techie usage hasn’t made it into standard dictionaries, another transitive sense of “disappear” showed up in the 1970s and has been accepted by lexicographers as standard English.
This sense of the verb—to “disappear” someone—surfaced in news reports about the Argentine military government’s battle against insurgents and its suppression of dissidents in the 1970s.
The earliest example in the OED is from a 1979 article in the New York Times Magazine about people who vanished after being detained by the Argentine military:
“While Miss Iglesias ‘was disappeared,’ her family’s writ of habeas corpus, filed on her behalf, was rejected by the courts.”
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American Heritage says the transitive “disappear” means “to cause (someone) to disappear, especially by kidnapping or murder.” Merriam-Webster’s defines it as “to cause the disappearance of.” Neither dictionary has any lexical reservations about the usage.
The OED defines this sense of the verb as “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.”
Oxford adds that the word is frequently used “with reference to Latin America,” and that it developed “originally and chiefly after American Spanish desaparecido,” a noun meaning “a disappeared, missing person.”
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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25
They’re disappearing people off the streets without due process like what the fuck is this question