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Ah yes I missed that part, that is indeed a tricky back reference to manage and pull off in prose.
by jxramos 3y ago
Ah yes I missed that part, that is indeed a tricky back reference to manage and pull off in prose.
- sanderjd 3y agoI think this is a pretty common construction in (especially older) british english. I think it is also the back reference the parent commenter notes, but I don't think it would have been unclear without that reference, especially at the time he wrote it.
- jxramos 3y agoI wonder if its mostly expressed in the negative form, because "the done thing" by itself is like an incomplete sentence and an ambiguous phrase. Kind of grammatically squishy in some fascinating way.
- sanderjd 3y agoI don't think it seems incomplete or ambiguous. To me, it is pretty clear that it is turning the verb form of "done" - that is, not the adjective meaning "finished", but the past tense of the verb "do" as in "fishing is an activity that people have done for a long time" - into an adjective modifying "thing". So a "done thing" is just "a thing that is being done". Using that fishing example again, it shifts from "fishing is a thing that is done by people" to just "fishing is a done thing". This "adjectivizing" technique is a common way that colloquialisms are created. (Maybe it's a bit weirder in this case because an adjective form of the word already exists, but has a different meaning.)