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.
TMWNN 53 minutes ago [-]
>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
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.
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.
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:
There are similar scenes in our world today. Not being played out today, but really happening.
imsurajkadam 11 hours ago [-]
Why dont they use the simple english to understand?
noduerme 11 hours ago [-]
English is a very beautiful language. There are many ways to say something similar, but each have slightly different meanings. In this case, the writer decided to use "flowery" language, which is usually to create a detailed picture, smell, and feeling for the reader. The point is not only to convey facts but to convey a sense of place. That is the reason for the complicated language.
For example, it says:
"A woman in her forties sits on a bench, fixing the shrine with her gaze."
This means that the woman sits on a bench looking at the shrine. But "fixing" it "with her gaze" means that she is staring at it with deep meaning and (possibly) reverence.
assimpleaspossi 10 hours ago [-]
To me that says her gaze is fixing the shrine.
SideburnsOfDoom 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly, and "fixing" in this sense means "nailing to the spot", or "fastening upon, halt, stop moving, be immobile like a fixed point or fixed price".
It's a poetic expression.
dambi0 10 hours ago [-]
What meaning do you infer from what it says?
bmacho 8 hours ago [-]
What it means. The most annoying about that quote is that it is a correct sentence, with one single trivial meaning. Easy right? Your favorite type of sentence. Well guess what, in the text it stands for a totally different thing (without any particular reason or benefit).
I much prefer GP's broken sentence. It is syntactically broken, but it has all the words, much better than if it was syntactically correct with an entirely different meaning than the intended one.
marky1991 10 hours ago [-]
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.
0xEF 9 hours ago [-]
> 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 must more creative and cant-like with the language historically, but even that is being lost as the generations are exposed to more modern settings, I think. In my experience, the idioms used usually come down to the individual, which has more to do with how their sense of identity was cultivated, a concept that runs quite deep in the American South, but that is a much longer and more complex thread for another day, I reckon.
marky1991 9 hours ago [-]
"("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.
genghisjahn 7 hours ago [-]
In Texas we’d say things like “I’m fixing to go over yonder.” Meaning “I’m about to go over there.”
mock-possum 3 hours ago [-]
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.
noduerme 8 hours ago [-]
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, or something attached by glue or paste. You can also say that a postage stamp is fixed on an envelope.
It's a great sentence if you understand the different things it is communicating compactly and efficiently.
marky1991 8 hours ago [-]
"fix one's gaze on" is not the construction used in the article.
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.
SideburnsOfDoom 8 hours ago [-]
If you want cites google "fix him with your gaze" or "fix it with your gaze" - including the quotes.
bmacho 7 hours ago [-]
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.
SideburnsOfDoom 5 hours ago [-]
There are hits for other permutations such as ""fix them with your gaze", "fix me with your gaze", "fix her with your gaze" etc.
If you're claiming that this is "wrong" then I think that's disproven. I don't even know what the point of that exercise would be. Just finally accept it as an opportunity to learn a new turn of phrase. You don't have to even use it, just accept that others do. IDK what the gatekeeping is about.
If you still feel the need, then IDK, write a strongly worded letter about it to the editor of The Critic? It says "Britain's Most Civilised Magazine" on the home page. Have at it, present your credentials, see if you get anywhere.
Or if you don't want to engage with the piece on its own terms, then maybe it's not for you. Not everything is written for everyone, and it's useless to complain about that.
8 hours ago [-]
marky1991 8 hours ago [-]
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.
SideburnsOfDoom 8 hours ago [-]
I have seen this construction before; I'm sorry if you have not. But that does not make it "broken".
marky1991 8 hours ago [-]
"I have seen this construction before" is not a very high bar for communicating well.
SideburnsOfDoom 5 hours ago [-]
"I have not seen this construction before, therefor it must be wrong"
Is a way to raise barriers to your own learning.
marky1991 4 hours ago [-]
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.
marssaxman 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder whether you have ever encountered poetry before.
SideburnsOfDoom 2 hours ago [-]
> What do you expect me to "learn" in this context?
I have now downgraded my expectations, learning is indeed optional.
> But the whole point of language is to communicate with others and this sentence is clearly confusing to many people.
Or - hear me out - maybe you're not in the target audience of this piece in "The Critic: Britain's Most Civilised Magazine". Not everything is written for everyone, and it's useless to complain about that. But you should at least be able to identify that it is a particular literate British tone, and know if that's your thing or not. If it is, then dig into the idioms. If it isn't then don't read it.
marky1991 13 minutes ago [-]
"I have now downgraded my expectations, learning is indeed optional."
So I ask you a question and you then don't answer it but instead just reply with sarcasm?
I don't think this is a polite way to have a conversation, so I'm out.
Galatians4_16 10 hours ago [-]
Depends on the correct spelling of gaze.
bmacho 9 hours ago [-]
> For example, it says: "A woman in her forties sits on a bench, fixing the shrine with her gaze."
This particular example I don't think is poetic rather it is broken.
afandian 8 hours ago [-]
At least in British English it’s perfectly fine. A bit poetic, but not an obscure construction.
edit — NB This is a British English publication. This is an American English default site.
SideburnsOfDoom 9 hours ago [-]
> I don't think is poetic rather it is broken.
No, it is not. You are merely unfamiliar with this sentence construction.
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".
smcin 4 hours ago [-]
"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).
noduerme 8 hours ago [-]
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.
marssaxman 2 hours ago [-]
Only if one is determined to be stubbornly pedantic about it! That would make no sense, so the poetic sense is obviously the one intended.
SideburnsOfDoom 5 hours ago [-]
> 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 phrase? No, it must be nonsense!"
bmacho 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mock-possum 3 hours ago [-]
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?
3 hours ago [-]
bmacho 8 hours ago [-]
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.
> Definition of gaze: (n): a long fixed look; "he fixed his paternal gaze on me"
bmacho 8 hours ago [-]
We are talking about 'fixing smth with a gaze' and not 'fixing gaze on smth'. The verb, the object and the subject are different.
afandian 7 hours ago [-]
A dictionary doesn’t capture the entire language. In this thread there are native speakers saying that this is a well formed, meaningful English sentence. Therefore it is.
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.
afandian 5 hours ago [-]
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 should at least respect if others don't want to join your argument.
(EDIT - Here's a past exam paper published by Cambridge that references such a phrase on page 16
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.
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 Most Civilised Magazine", is using a turn of phrase that's not well known in your neck 'o the woods? I doubt that they care about that.
4 hours ago [-]
afandian 5 hours ago [-]
Excuse me, do you have a license for that gerund?
SideburnsOfDoom 1 hours ago [-]
Well no, but I get tired of using the literary British voice after a while and I want to mix it up, demonstrate bending the rules, annoy the purists, épater le bourgeois, etc.
afandian 53 minutes ago [-]
Thank you, that reason is on the list of allowable exceptions.
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
SideburnsOfDoom 2 hours ago [-]
But it does use the word "fix" in the sense of "fasten upon, stop moving, make immobile" like a "fixed point" and not in the sense of "repair" or "make breakfast",
And does so in relation to "gaze" in the same sentence. How much more do you need - the rest seems nit-picking. Sentences aren't all fixed forms, they are creative combinations of words. (and as has been established, this form is not actually unique)
If you don't want to engage with the piece, then maybe it's not for you. Not everything is written for everyone, and it's useless to complain about that.
DeathArrow 10 hours ago [-]
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.
nottorp 9 hours ago [-]
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.
KineticLensman 7 hours ago [-]
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)
nindalf 7 hours ago [-]
Could you describe how the muslim-christian population exchange actually happened?
What is the agenda of this piece?
nottorp 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nindalf 48 minutes ago [-]
I'm still mystified about the agenda of the piece? I'm not implying that it has one or doesn't have one, I'm keen to know what agenda you saw in it.
Texasian 7 hours ago [-]
You say that as if it’s a bad thing.
Not all writing needs to be as dry as a technical bulletin.
nottorp 7 hours ago [-]
That’s how you do a proper propaganda piece, you write an emotional article that is mostly correct and insert subtle nudges to your actual topic :)
7 hours ago [-]
xyzsparetimexyz 11 hours ago [-]
That's a broken sentence.
dambi0 10 hours ago [-]
Broken seems a bit harsh. It might not be idiomatic, it might fall foul of some grammatical standard. But you know what it means.
xyzsparetimexyz 7 hours ago [-]
No, I do not! It is absolutely derived of context.
nindalf 7 hours ago [-]
Kinda like how I understood what you meant here ("absolutely devoid of context") in spite of your error ("derived of context"). Sometimes we need to make an effort to understand.
I wouldn't make you feel bad by saying "that's a broken sentence! I can't understand it!"
9 hours ago [-]
Galatians4_16 10 hours ago [-]
Be glad it's not Pidgin.
Rendered at 17:41:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
"European borders aren't drawn along ethnic lines, the ethnic lines are drawn along the borders." —/u/sora_mui, two days ago <https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1j86d8i/the_balkani...>
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:
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.
For example, it says: "A woman in her forties sits on a bench, fixing the shrine with her gaze."
This means that the woman sits on a bench looking at the shrine. But "fixing" it "with her gaze" means that she is staring at it with deep meaning and (possibly) reverence.
It's a poetic expression.
I much prefer GP's broken sentence. It is syntactically broken, but it has all the words, much better than if it was syntactically correct with an entirely different meaning than the intended one.
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.
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 must more creative and cant-like with the language historically, but even that is being lost as the generations are exposed to more modern settings, I think. In my experience, the idioms used usually come down to the individual, which has more to do with how their sense of identity was cultivated, a concept that runs quite deep in the American South, but that is a much longer and more complex thread for another day, I reckon.
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.
It's a great sentence if you understand the different things it is communicating compactly and efficiently.
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.
IDK, you could just look up the idiom that you are unfamiliar with? So that next time you come across it, you are better informed.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/fix+his+with+a+gaze
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fix-a-g...
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're claiming that this is "wrong" then I think that's disproven. I don't even know what the point of that exercise would be. Just finally accept it as an opportunity to learn a new turn of phrase. You don't have to even use it, just accept that others do. IDK what the gatekeeping is about.
If you still feel the need, then IDK, write a strongly worded letter about it to the editor of The Critic? It says "Britain's Most Civilised Magazine" on the home page. Have at it, present your credentials, see if you get anywhere.
Or if you don't want to engage with the piece on its own terms, then maybe it's not for you. Not everything is written for everyone, and it's useless to complain about that.
Is a way to raise barriers to your own learning.
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.
I have now downgraded my expectations, learning is indeed optional.
> But the whole point of language is to communicate with others and this sentence is clearly confusing to many people.
Or - hear me out - maybe you're not in the target audience of this piece in "The Critic: Britain's Most Civilised Magazine". Not everything is written for everyone, and it's useless to complain about that. But you should at least be able to identify that it is a particular literate British tone, and know if that's your thing or not. If it is, then dig into the idioms. If it isn't then don't read it.
So I ask you a question and you then don't answer it but instead just reply with sarcasm?
I don't think this is a polite way to have a conversation, so I'm out.
This particular example I don't think is poetic rather it is broken.
edit — NB This is a British English publication. This is an American English default site.
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
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).
I think it was a conscious and valid choice to use this in relation to a static holy object in this context.
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 phrase? No, it must be nonsense!"
What do you hope to accomplish here?
Seems like this proves my point tbh.
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"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351500
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351604
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.
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 should at least respect if others don't want to join your argument.
(EDIT - Here's a past exam paper published by Cambridge that references such a phrase on page 16
https://pastpapers.co/cie/O-Level/English-Language-1123/2019... )
> https://pastpapers.co/cie/O-Level/English-Language-1123/2019...
Okay, I can accept this.
> 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 Most Civilised Magazine", is using a turn of phrase that's not well known in your neck 'o the woods? I doubt that they care about that.
And does so in relation to "gaze" in the same sentence. How much more do you need - the rest seems nit-picking. Sentences aren't all fixed forms, they are creative combinations of words. (and as has been established, this form is not actually unique)
If you don't want to engage with the piece, then maybe it's not for you. Not everything is written for everyone, and it's useless to complain about that.
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.
(This is a comment on the magazine that published TFA, not TFA itself)
What is the agenda of this piece?
Also there is a top level post with a bunch of references now.
Not all writing needs to be as dry as a technical bulletin.
I wouldn't make you feel bad by saying "that's a broken sentence! I can't understand it!"