Yes perhaps that is an excuse but it seems hard to believe they picked on the word missing to dumb down or improve since the fact that the person or thing is still missing no matter how you dress it up. Again again.

@lerlo I hear ya, I hear ya.

Yes but that doesnt make it ok to me. Usually called redundancy in my book. But in the "missing" situation it's not even redundant, it adds zero meaning. Help me understand what "\went missing" or "go missing" adds to just being missing? People need to say "yet again" why? It means again. Perhaps in my line of work, where speech and the conservation of words is important, it matters more to me. But I'm also generally anti-needless However my original question is when it started happening in the U.S. and why.

@lerlo I’m not sure when it started. Pedantic as I can be, the phrasing really doesn’t bother me. People are described as ‘disappeared’ when there’s questions/mystery involved, or possible foul play. Went missing from school, as in, that’s the last place they were proven to be. Sadly, some are not noticed for days or longer...they truly HAVE ‘gone missing’ in that nobody knows when, how, etc. as opposed to kidnapped or whatever.
I supposed we all have our grammatical pet peeves. I’m a retired RN so mine tend towards medical terms, not grammar exactly but I can’t help correcting folks on false info.

aha, but, if they just shot up the classroom and stopped, who did it? "the shooter" so active does mean perhaps that they are still doing it

Yes, but they used to do it by themselves without going....YOU left them where they are

Yeah, any idea about when the change started?

@lerlo around here I would say between the early to mid 90s I'm speaking of local news to Cleveland.

@oldFloyd ok thanks. I'm thinking they say it in England and that was about the time we decided that we needed British MC's on our tv shows and news anchors.

@Allamanda yes but you also say "they went to hospital" and you don't leave out the "the" for anything other noun For instance you don't say "they went to restaurant" or "they went to football game"

No, maybe it WAS missing all along but it certainly didn't GO missing. Key comment is that YOU are missing...

is that akin to "I'm fixin' to?"

@lerlo Yes. That too.

@lerlo I've never understood the Americanism "I'll fix dinner". Huh? Is it broken or something? We 'make' dinner where I live.

@MsDemeanour Again, semantics. In another part of my state—North Carolina—they say ‘carry’ for both take and bring. It took me aback at first.
I’m from further west NC, and I grew up hearing ‘fixin’ to’. I tend to say ‘about to’. It’s about intention, rather than action, lol. It’s hot here, we gotta work up to it.

@CarolinaGirl60 I was wrong to make it sound like a complaint or that I was superior. As I think about it, I quite like the different idiosyncrasies around language and accents. It helps us identify where someone is from. And wouldn't it be boring if we all sounded identical? .

@Allamanda Yes! Yes! lol. 'self-aggrandizing' I like that and it is exactly what I hear if someone says they 'gifted'.

@MsDemeanour I agree, and that's the same response I always have when people say "fixin'" but people who say that don't like that retort.

@Renickulous that doesn't say anything about making dinner. And that's the Webster dictionary so it's not real English

@MsDemeanour I attempted to fix many dinners that my ex-wife had cooked.