escape

escape verb and noun.

There are three significant 20c uses, the first two of the verb and the third of the noun:

1. In intransitive use (without an object), to describe astronauts overcoming gravity and leaving the earth's atmosphere:

• A spaceship will escape from Earth at 11.2 kilometres a second —Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1949.

2. In transitive use (with an object), to mean ‘to escape from (a place)’, both of astronauts as in the previous paragraph and in other contexts, such as escape from a convent in the following example:

• It transpires she may have escaped Santa Clara to look for a well-known terrorist —N. Shakespeare, 1989.

This is a revival of an older use and shows an obvious relation to more standard transitive uses as in escaping danger, arrest, criticism, suspicion, and other unwelcome circumstances. Note that to escape prison usually means ‘to avoid a custodial sentence’

• (A former lollipop lady who stabbed her husband in a row over debts has escaped prison —South Wales Evening Post, 2007)

if an escape from a state of imprisonment is meant it is better to say escape from prison.

3. In computing, escape is a noun denoting a function (and keyboard key) that ends an operation or affects a following sequence of commands in some way. For anyone who has fallen into any of the engulfing traps that computer technology can lay for the unwary, the notion of escape provides a potent image.