![]() As shareeditflag's answer says, it can also be used to mean "murdered, but in a way that is officially treated as a suicide (or in a way that looks like suicide)". "Suicided" doesn't always mean "made to commit suicide". I cannot give chapter and verse but certainly in college days (forty years on) I was familiar with this usage from teachers and colleagues.Ī note on the meaning of transitive "to suicide" The death of Czech FM Jan Masaryk in 1948, which the authorities called suicide–he had evidently squeezed his way out of a narrow window near the roof of a bathroom–was one of the examples that led to the phrase "he was suicided" being commonly used among those concerned in the Cold War period about the USSR, Eastern Europe. I've always been a bit surprised that the usage didn't catch on. He seems to have meant something like "driven to suicide by…". It's usually translated as "Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society". In 1947, the French surrealist poet Artaud wrote "Van Gogh le suicidé de la société", a title which I gather is as odd in French as it is in English. Yeah, there's 'disappeared', and I've heard 'volunteered' used that way ![]() Here is a brief selection of quotes that I found particularly relevant to your question: You can see more discussion of similar expressions in the comments. ![]() The passive-voice expression "be suicided" has been mentioned as a translation of the Chinese expression bèi zìshā 被自殺 in a Language Log post by Victor Mair: " Suicided: the adversative passive as a form of active resistance" (2010 March 24). ( shareeditflag's answer to Can one conjugate and use 'suicide' as a verb?, posted 2014 Jan 22) My favorite verb conjugation for the word is, "so and so was suicided" ( Sharon Kramer's answer to Usage of the word suicide - validity of 'suiciding', posted 2015 Aug 23) Example: "Aaron Swartz was suicided by the U.S. What it means is that someone was bullied to the point that they took their own life. Suicided as it is used today is a relatively new word to the English language. It has been mentioned in the answers to two other questions about the verb suicide: As the COCA query mentioned in Gnawme's answer indicates, it's not a common usage. Whether it's "commonly acceptable" is not really a matter of opinion, but it's likely to be treated as one, since it's hard to actually find the answer to this question. Are you just wondering if there are any speakers who would find it ungrammatical or unacceptable? The comments beneath your question suggest that there probably are. So you already know that it is grammatical for them (or at least, that they find it acceptable to use in print in the context of those quotes). It seems unlikely that the authors of the quotes that you cite made an "error" according to their own systems of grammar (although I would imagine they were conscious of the unconventionality of this expression). "X was suicided by Y" doesn't violate any general principle of syntax (it seems to behave the same syntactically as "X was murdered by Y"), so any relevant "grammar" considerations would have to be word-specific, and it's clear that different English speakers often have different intuitions about the grammaticality of specific usages of words. I don't think the users of this site really have much ability to answer the question "Is the transitive usage of suicide grammatical and commonly acceptable?" Is the transitive usage of suicide grammatical and commonly acceptable? I couldn't find any dictionary to suggest such usage.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |