From a magazine report on magicians：‘Now, in Beyond Belief, they disappear a five-ton elephant ’, and then, ‘Appearing and disappearing wild animals has become their trademark（like all magicians, they refuse to reveal how this is done）. ’
I thought ‘appear’ and ‘disappear’ are always used as intransitive verbs, without even a single exception as far as I Know, but here they appear to be used as vt,don’t they？
I think most people (especially in the UK) would say. they make a five-foot elephant disappear. Making animals appear and disappear has become their trademark.’
I’ve noticed that the uses of the terms when applied to magic illusions have gradually evolved, especially in the US. I can’t think of any other situation other than in a reference to a magic illusion where it would be used in that way. (I suspect this is about the double act, Siegfried and Roy.) I don’t think it’s yet all that common even when talking about illusions at the moment.
0h，you are of so wide knowledge：my citations come just from a magazine story about the career of these two magicians！Thank you very much.
Considering usual dictionary lag, would you be interested to know what some of them say: ”to cause to disappear, through kidnapping, clandestine execution etc …speculation has been circulating that Mr Gao may have been ‘disappeared’ by security forces because of his anti-government activity…” \Macmillan\ See also thefreedictionary.com
And fresh from the BBC: “I want to say a big apology to all the fans. Hopefully I can rectify it,” he told BBC Radio Humberside. “I want the ground to swallow me up and disappear but you can’t do that.”
–Of course, you could say he meant: “I want the ground to swallow me up and [I want to] disappear”, still it could well read: “I want the ground to swallow up and disappear [me]” which sounds even more like it there. Do you agree?..
No, I totally disagree - I think that’s stretching it too far!
Alan
The Merriam-Webster and American Heritage (US) and the Oxford (UK) dictionaries still don’t list a transitive usage of “disappear”. The transitive usage appears in the crowdsourced dictionaries.
It has become more and more common in slang to use “disappear” as a transitive verb meaning to make someone or something disappear in some sinister way, such as, “The secret police disappeared the dictator’s opponents,” or, “He is crazy enough to cause major trouble if we kick him out of the organization, so I disappeared his online profile and pretended it was a computer glitch.”
Before I saw this post, I’d never heard “disappear” used transitively in reference to magic tricks, but it’s not too far-fetched anymore.