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The city that forgot itself

thecritic.co.uk

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Re: The city that forgot itself

#31

Post by smcin »

bmacho wrote: post #24
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think is poetic rather it is broken. No, it is not. You are merely unfamiliar with this sentence construction. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fix-a-g... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/fix-one-s-gaze https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/fix+his+with+a+gaze

Collins and Cambridge don't know about it (despite Cambridge having one of the best and largest corpus of spoken and written English). Thefreedictionary I don't accept as reliable. Seems like this proves my point tbh.

GP post cites Collins defining "fix a gaze on"! https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fix-a-g...

Yes Collins knows about it.

Even this lesser-known site knows about it: https://texttospeech.io/thesaurus/gaze

> Definition of gaze: (n): a long fixed look; "he fixed his paternal gaze on me"

Re: The city that forgot itself

#32

Post by marky1991 »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #25
marky1991 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Collins example is not the same thing; you're fixing your gaze, not fixing the object itself. Again, the grammar just isn't the same.

I have seen this construction before; I'm sorry if you have not. But that does not make it "broken".

"I have seen this construction before" is not a very high bar for communicating well.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#33

Post by marky1991 »

noduerme wrote: post #29
marky1991 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I legitimately would have to guess what they meant. The obvious reading to me is that she is magically repairing it by looking at it, though I would know that's not what they meant, which leaves brute force guessing. You can say that someone is 'fixed on' something, which means to look doggedly, but 'fixing something' is totally different, who says that? Subjective of course, but I just think it's a bad sentence.

Fixing one's gaze on something is a standard English expression, it's just the active form of to be fixed on , which is passive. It means, literally, that one's line of sight is 'fixed upon' something. One's mind can also be fixed upon something. The verb is to fix or to affix. 'Fixed to' simply means 'attached to', but 'fixed on ' usually implies something lighter attached to a weightier, possibly vertical surface,…

"fix one's gaze on" is not the construction used in the article.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#34

Post by noduerme »

stavros wrote: post #30
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think is poetic rather it is broken. No, it is not. You are merely unfamiliar with this sentence construction. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fix-a-g... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/fix-one-s-gaze https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/fix+his+with+a+gaze

The construction wasn't "fixing her gaze on the shrine" (which would be correct), it was "fixing the shrine with her gaze", which makes no sense. What the article says means either "she fastens the shrine into place using her eyes" or "she repairs the shrine with her eyes".

Indeed, the construction gives the feeling that the shrine itself might float away without her gaze, such is the intensity of her watching it. That is purposeful. It comes from the common phrase "she fixed him with her gaze" which means, not as much that her gaze was fixed on him, as that he froze when he saw her looking at him.

I think it was a conscious and valid choice to use this in relation to a static holy object in this context.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#35

Post by bmacho »

smcin wrote: post #31
bmacho wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collins and Cambridge don't know about it (despite Cambridge having one of the best and largest corpus of spoken and written English). Thefreedictionary I don't accept as reliable. Seems like this proves my point tbh.

GP post cites Collins defining "fix a gaze on"! https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fix-a-g... Yes Collins knows about it. Even this lesser-known site knows about it: https://texttospeech.io/thesaurus/gaze > Definition of gaze: (n): a long fixed look; "he fixed his paternal gaze on me"

We are talking about 'fixing smth with a gaze' and not 'fixing gaze on smth'. The verb, the object and the subject are different.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#36

Post by [deleted] »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #28
bmacho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collins is a counterpoint, right? Well it is, as it doesn't know this phrase. Thefreedictionary I don't now what that is. I'd be much more convinced if it cited examples from actual usage from books, articles, subtitles. Looks more machine generated to me than human work.

If you want cites google "fix him with your gaze" or "fix it with your gaze" - including the quotes.

[deleted]

Re: The city that forgot itself

#37

Post by bmacho »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #28
bmacho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collins is a counterpoint, right? Well it is, as it doesn't know this phrase. Thefreedictionary I don't now what that is. I'd be much more convinced if it cited examples from actual usage from books, articles, subtitles. Looks more machine generated to me than human work.

If you want cites google "fix him with your gaze" or "fix it with your gaze" - including the quotes.

It has ~3 results. 1 talks about making something immovable with your gaze with a spell in a fantasy setting. The other 2 are in blogspam articles of German companies, one of them is also available in several other languages, presumably machine translated.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#38

Post by KineticLensman »

nottorp wrote: post #13
DeathArrow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an informative article, it's a piece designed to convey emotions and sentiments so readers are more willing to embrace author's view.

There seems to be an agenda there. If you check wikipedia at least, the muslim-christian population exchange between Greece and Turkey wasn't quite like the article describes it. The facts may be somewhere in the middle, but certainly not in this article.

FWIW The Critic is associated with the British conservative movement so there is definitely a leaning to the political right

(This is a comment on the magazine that published TFA, not TFA itself)

Re: The city that forgot itself

#39

Post by jhbadger »

While I haven't been there, I know of it from Alan Furst's novels (which I recommend) -- he writes novels set before and during WWII and likes to often set them in places like Thessaloniki/Salonika in Greece and Trieste in Italy -- places which were on the border between two (or more) cultures and which lost a lot of their multicultural status due to the war.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#40

Post by Texasian »

nottorp wrote: post #13
DeathArrow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an informative article, it's a piece designed to convey emotions and sentiments so readers are more willing to embrace author's view.

There seems to be an agenda there. If you check wikipedia at least, the muslim-christian population exchange between Greece and Turkey wasn't quite like the article describes it. The facts may be somewhere in the middle, but certainly not in this article.

You say that as if it’s a bad thing.

Not all writing needs to be as dry as a technical bulletin.

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