Is It Now We Go?

This from one of my student's recent paper on the Holocaust “Hitler was doomed to die, so before Nazi Germany’s defeat, he poisoned his beloved dog and suicided with his wife Eva Braun.”

I have noticed that my students will use the word suicide as a verb (an intransitive verb to be precise). In standard American English, suicide is a noun. To turn it into an action, you need to embed it in “he committed suicide.” I am not the only one to pick up on this. My colleagues have noted this peculiar usage as well. Usually, when I encounter anomalies like this, my first instinct is to attribute it to the influence of the British. But my British, Aussie, and Kiwi colleagues are taking no credit for this one.

My second guess was that it mirrors Cantonese. Sure enough, after asking a few of my Cantonese-speaking colleagues, “he suicided” parallels how it would be said in Cantonese. My colleague who teaches first graders and who is also a Cantonese speaker tells me his first graders frequently use the following sentence structure “Mr. Tan, is it now we eat our snacks?” He tells me this is exactly the way the question is structured in Cantonese.

Another favorite of mine among elementary students is when they challenge each other to a competition, they use the word versus in a non-standard fashion. “Hey, Mr. Tan, come verse me in ping pong.” Or, “At lunch today, the boys are versing the girls in soccer.”Sometimes they just abbreviate it down to “vee-es” as in “Okay, I will vee-es you now.”

I love it.

-Jack