I recently rode the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, and was told by the mechanical voice: "All passengers must disembark the vessel." This sounds wrong to me, so I looked it up, American Heritage Dictionary and several online dictionaries. They all seemed to agree that disembark is an intransitive verb when it means to get off the boat, and when it's transitive, it means to cause something or someone to get off the boat, eg. disembarking troops *from* a ship. I've just started reading The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker, and the first chapter seems to relate to the kinds of verbs that can be messed with like this. Load a wagon with hay and load hay into a wagon, for example. To me, disembark doesn't seem to have this flexibility. What do you think?
Will
You're right. This is a rapidly spreading mis-use. Yesterday I read an advert for a cruise which talked of 'disembarking the boat'. This would actually mean taking the boat off another boat. On London Underground you will often hear would-be literate announcers telling passengers to take care while 'disembarking the train'. I don't think Pinker's example is relevant to this particular use - what people are doing here is using 'disembark' as if it were 'leave' or 'abandon' or 'desert' and 'embark' as if it were 'board'.
The thing I might take from Pinker's example is that one could say
The passengers disembarked from the vessel/boat/train.
The crew disembarked the passengers from the vessel/boat/train.
Irvingmoses and Glen (our ESL guru) are correct regarding the use/misuse of "disembark," and so this thread is effectively complete. Still, on reading it I was reminded of another curious usage encountered in the realm of transportation: get on the plane.
George Carlin had a routine about that. He related how the gate agent would always tell him to "get on the plane." His response was "[blank] you! Let the daredevils get on the plane ... I'm getting in the plane!"
It is a curious use, no? We "get in the car," "get in the submarine," and "get in the elevator." But we "get on the plane," get "on the ride" (like at an amusement park), and "get on the boat."
Doesn't seem to be any logic behind the various choices. Perhaps it's driven by tradition or jargon. I don't know. Anyone have any insights on this? It's a curious type of usage that I've always wondered about.
What I do know is that prepositions are among the last things of any foreign language that a non-native speaker will master. They never make complete sense in any language I have looked into, and English is no exception. The real danger is deluding yourself that you finally understand how to use them.