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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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So are we soon to be saying go engaged, went engaged, and gone engaged? How romantic. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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go engaged
Close. Take the n from reinyartnation, plosivate it and devoice it into a t and stick it in there and you get got engaged.
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Joined: Mar 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Close. Take the n from reinyartnation, plosivate it and devoice it into a t and stick it in there and you get got engaged.Hey! This is Q & A...I'm attempting a serious word discussion here! Plosivate schmlosivate.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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become/will become extinct
Assume, if you will, that the Perlicue decided to become extinct, and therefore went extinct (consider this a direction rather like "east" or "west" or "up" or "down"). Given this, it could come back from the extinct at any time it chooses. Consider the conversation it could subsequently have at a Friday night cocktail hour:
"Oh, yes, we all went extinct a couple of hundred years ago, but damn it all, the cost of housing and land taxes just absolutely went through the ceiling, dahlink. Coming back unextinct was the only economically sensible option. And we've discovered that nothing much has changed. Except the gin went dearer, of course!"
This is, you will realise, at least three very wet martinis into the party ...
- Pfranz
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Carpal Tunnel
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It's a juan way road, Pfranz
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I was reading an article on some folks who are attempting to trace LOTR to myths of old storytelling (I'll start another threaf for that in Misc.), and encountered this gem of misuse, IMO, using went missing now in a military casualty sense? C'mon, now that's really taking it over the cliff. It's missing-in-action or "killed, wound, and/or missing"...but "killed, wounded, and/or went missing"...what! I hate it! Here's the context (I'm including the second paragraph for the sake of clarity for LOTR aficionados):
>They also linked Tolkien's sword-and-sorcery classic to the Civil War battle of Antietam while visiting the battlefield during the weeklong seminar. More than 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing there in the bloodiest, single-day clash of the war.
"We thought the connection was that, just as the Tolkien book is about the great battle, this is the place of the one-day, great battle in North America," Wilhelm said. "With the Civil War, there's a kind of sacred aura about it. A lot of lives were lost, a lot of passion was put into it." <
What thinkest the board?
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Carpal Tunnel
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During the Civil War a lot of soldiers went missing. It was also called deserting or skedaddling.
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Carpal Tunnel
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No, Faldage...there was always a small percentage of desertion in any battle, but in the standard battle casualty designations of "killed, wounded, and/or missing" missing refers to those killed without ID, disfigured beyond recognition without any identifying papers, and, sadly, large numbers simply blown to bits, disintergrated or rendered into red mist by grape shot and cannister. Thousands of men were missing-in-action after the vast open-field engagement of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. This term has been carried through in warfare to this day. It's not a desertion stat. "Went missing" in this case is just flat wrong and abhorrent to the ear.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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The use of "went missing" - to me anyway - says that the reason for a person's being missing is unknown as in any one of the circumstances you stated above and also includes a soldier's being concussed and simply wandering off in a daze/haze. A kind of battle amnesia? I would infer there is a slight - very slight - chance the soldier might turn up later(possibly with a head wound)with no memory of where he had been or what he had done.
As to "went extinct" I would infer that the reason for extinction is unknown : loss of habitat; killed by predators; drought, etc.
We do seem to get our dainties all in a twist when the language changes, don't we? I have several peeves but I've learned to shrug them off when encounterd because some are transitory and sanity soon returns. As for those that take root .... well what can one do ? (Sigh)
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Carpal Tunnel
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The author of the example you listed wouldn't be a Britspeaker by any chance, Juan? They say funny things like that sometimes
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