Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The city that forgot itself

thecritic.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: The city that forgot itself

#61

Post by [deleted] »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #56
bmacho wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you and the other guy, claiming London in his bio (we don't know if he's a native speaker or not). It might be a regional dialect, which is also a form of broken English, especially if it is very obscure and other English speakers can't even guess the meaning of the idiom out of context.

Yes, I am a native UK English speaker. > It might be a regional dialect, a) it isn't - it might be archaic and poetic, but I don't view it as "regional" > a regional dialect is also a form of broken English Wrong! That's not how it works. As the sibling comment says, what do you want? To understand the piece, improve your vocabulary or to tell the writer that they're Englishing wrong because "The Critic - Britain's M…

[deleted]

Re: The city that forgot itself

#62

Post by bmacho »

afandian wrote: post #55
bmacho wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you and the other guy, claiming London in his bio (we don't know if he's a native speaker or not). It might be a regional dialect, which is also a form of broken English, especially if it is very obscure and other English speakers can't even guess the meaning of the idiom out of context.

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here. If you're trying to understand the original article I think you have enough information. If you want to expand your understanding of English then you have some leads to follow and an opportunity to learn. If you don't believe them that's your choice, but it's not evidence to the contrary. If you're trying to gate-keep and prescribe someone else's language, then you sho…

I don't try to accomplish here anything. I expressed my opinion that I don't think that particular phrase is poetic, it is just broken without being poetic. Then people tried to prove that it is indeed an existing English idiom, which is usually very easy, they are in the dictionaries, in the books, in the articles, on the internet. Then they failed during this process, which made me more confident in my opinion.

> https://pastpapers.co/cie/O-Level/English-Language-1123/2019...

Okay, I can accept this.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#63

Post by mikhailfranco »

It is contemporarily relevant to look at the euphemistic 'exchange of populations' during and after the Greco-Turkish War. Today it would be called 'ethnic cleansing'. In Anatolia itself, it took the form of genocide. The Turks had recently executed the Armenian and Assyrian (Sayfo) genocides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Gr...

Most vividly, it was covered by journalist Ernest Hemingway for the Toronto Star:

   A Silent, Ghastly Procession Wends Its Way from Thrace (20 Oct 1922)
   Refugee Procession is Scene of Horror (14 Nov 1922)
But he also put his experiences into fiction, especially "On The Quai At Smyrna", describing the tragic murderous evacuation of Greeks from (what is now) Izmir, Turkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Quai_at_Smyrna

Some telling quotes here:

https://www.neomagazine.com/2022/04/on-the-quay-at-smyrna-er...

You can find these works in many collections of his journalism and short stories (e.g. "Byline"). I am very glad his early work is now coming out of copyright (and the journalism in Canada too? - if someone has links to his original articles, please post them).

Here is an out-of-copyright paragraph of "In Our Time", which recollects the refugee columns passing through Thrace, to and from Salonika, in 1922:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61085/pg61085-images.ht...

There are similar scenes in our world today. Not being played out today, but really happening.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#64

Post by marky1991 »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #53
marky1991 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"I have not seen this construction before, therefor it must be wrong" Is a way to raise barriers to your own learning.

What do you expect me to "learn" in this context? I'm a native English speaker, there's nothing to learn here as far as I can see. No one has reported it to be a common phrase in any known dialect and the strongest defense for it is an entry in a community provided dictionary and some people misreading it as other phrases.

I have never said anything was "wrong", I said it was poor communication. Wrong is not a useful concept in language. But the whole point of language is to communicate with others and this sentence is clearly confusing to many people.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#65

Post by smcin »

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".

"fixing the shrine with her gaze" totally makes sense (I'm also a native speaker of English, that makes four) and is semantically equivalent to "fixing her gaze on the shrine", it merely chooses to emphasize "the shrine" as the object, rather than "her gaze". Clearly "fix" here means "attaching securely"(/"locking on to") not "repairing", that Collins citation already given above also defined "fix" https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fix

And adding the preposition "with" to get the preposition phrase "with her gaze" doesn't change the meaning: clearly the sentence is about her gaze being firmly on the shrine (not the shrine being firmly on her gaze).

Re: The city that forgot itself

#66

Post by Someone »

marky1991 wrote: post #16
Someone wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fix : to direct one's attention or efforts : FOCUS also : DECIDE, SETTLE —usually used with on had fixed on the first Saturday in June All eyes fixed on her as she entered the room.

Yes, exactly: 'Fixed ON', the eyes are "fixed", it's completely different grammar.

The example uses on, but the entry says usually used with on. That leaves open images that do not use on.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#67

Post by mock-possum »

bmacho wrote: post #60
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was "fixing the shrine with her gaze", which makes no sense. Again, I disagree, it's a poetic construction, possibly a bit dated, and so the other commenter pointed out, probably more UK English than US English. You don't have to be familiar with it. But there's a kind of closed-minded arrogance to reading such an otherwise well-written piece and concluding "is it me that doesn't know this particular turn of phr…

I mean the dictionaries don't now it, and google doesn't know it. Also what about your arrogance, just because you've heard it, it doesn't mean that it's correct. I've heard a lot of things that are considered broken English.

The irony of you accusing them of arrogance while you refuse to accept an English speaker’s description of how their own language is used - while commenting on an article about fascism and genocide and the erasure of culture - is just -

What do you hope to accomplish here?

Re: The city that forgot itself

#68

Post by mock-possum »

marky1991 wrote: post #17
0xEF wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who says that? People who watch US TV shows about the American South. Having lived there for awhile and still travel there for work today, I can say with some certainty that the folksy dialect that media gives to people of that region is either largely embellished or made-up. If we stay on the word "fix," I mostly hear it in context of someone making a meal ("Fixing breakfast," etc). The Appalachian regions are mus…

"("Fixing breakfast," etc)." Yes, this makes sense, you can fix ('make', off the top of my head, only used in this sense for cooking really) breakfast, but surely the author doesn't mean the woman was materializing/cooking a shrine as a dish with her eyes either.

No, it’s “fix” in the sense of “fix in place” - to pin something to one spot. “I can’t move the table, it’s fixed in place.”

Her gaze is fixed upon - her gaze is fixing. Within her field of view, her deliberate staring at the shrine has fixed it in place. Her eyes are fixed in place, focused on the shrine.

‘In place’ is implied by the context.

Re: The city that forgot itself

#69

Post by [deleted] »

mock-possum wrote: post #67
bmacho wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the dictionaries don't now it, and google doesn't know it. Also what about your arrogance, just because you've heard it, it doesn't mean that it's correct. I've heard a lot of things that are considered broken English.

The irony of you accusing them of arrogance while you refuse to accept an English speaker’s description of how their own language is used - while commenting on an article about fascism and genocide and the erasure of culture - is just - What do you hope to accomplish here?

[deleted]

Re: The city that forgot itself

#70

Post by nottorp »

nindalf wrote: post #49
nottorp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you describe how the muslim-christian population exchange actually happened? What is the agenda of this piece?

I've pointed you to wikipedia. I'm no historian (trustable or not) so you'll have to document yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Also there is a top level post with a bunch of references now.

Post reply on HN