Talk:hindsight

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Latest comment: 2 years ago by Backinstadiums in topic Adverb?
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RFM discussion: October–November 2010[edit]

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.


We have a translation table for in hindsight. Should that have its own entry, or the translations moved to another location? Mglovesfun (talk) 15:39, 31 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

No OneLook dictionary has "in hindsight" as an entry. In contrast we (and AHD Idioms and Wordnet have in sight). The synonymous, though less evocative, "in retrospect" is even more common as a sentence adverbial. One could also say "from hindsight". "In" is often used with similar terms of 'reach' (earshot, sight, grasp, range, hailing distance). I conclude that there is little reason to consider "in hindsight" an idiom.
The translations seem only to have value in selecting the appropriate preposition. If they have another grammatical form, one could argue that they are translations for the paraphrases of "in hindsight" that have different grammatical properties than prepositional phrases. For example, "retrospectively" is a suitable paraphrase for normal adverbial use of the PP. "Looking back" is suitable for the sentence adverb use. Neither is suitable for the predicate use: "His wisdom was only in hindsight." I conclude that the translation table is misleading as a translation table for "in hindsight". DCDuring TALK 18:12, 31 October 2010 (UTC)Reply
Yes, move the translations if that's the best option. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:25, 2 November 2010 (UTC)Reply


Adverb?[edit]

Hindsight, the overall management could've been done much better --Backinstadiums (talk) 22:34, 8 September 2021 (UTC)Reply