| пропавший без вести | gone missing (go missing (= to disappear, become lost) is a Britishism that has encountered an odd mix of resistance and acceptance in AmE. Still, it seems to be on an irreversible ascent–e.g.: "In Fort Worth last June, bronze memory urns disappeared from graveyards. The following month, at a high school football field in Washington, D.C., 750 pounds of aluminum bleachers went missing." Telis Demos, "The Dark Side of Metal Madness," Forbes, 9 July 2007, at 32. The phrase, now recorded in W11 and NOAD, chafes many Americans. Some object to the notion of voluntariness that go suggests (did the bleachers in the example above run away and hide?). They incorrectly assume that the idiom suggests voluntary absence and should therefore be restricted to uses such as desertion or going AWOL. Others believe it to be ungrammatical. But many usage pros defend it. Although the phrase has been traced to the late 19th century, it spread primarily in World War II with reports of British air and sea missions when planes or ships didn't return. It began its spike in AmE usage in the mid-1990s, especially in missing-persons reports. GMAU Alexander Demidov) |
