The phrase "has replaced something" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to talk about a situation when one thing has been taken away and another has taken its place. For example: "The use of smartphones has replaced the need to carry a paper map."
Silly though it would be to suggest that the city should be fossilized by postwar nostalgia, it seems even sillier to have replaced something as special as Milan's old subway system with an unremarkable one.
The question now is whether it has replaced it with something just as bad.
And Trump has replaced it with something more dangerous: white identity politics.
What has replaced it is something far more fluid – descriptive rather than prescriptive, as the terminology goes.
I was unhappy to see the hazelnut-crusted foie gras with figs disappear from the menu, with the waning of the fig season, but Mr. Wilson has replaced it with something I like even better, a big slab of seared foie gras resting on an oozing slice of caramelized pineapple.
His conclusion is that, whatever the sins of the prewar empires — he doesn't ignore their sins, for he was now a socialist — what has replaced them is something worse: a wrecked, valueless world, caught between bogus political rhetoric on the one hand and, on the other, a fatuous illusionism, a dream world retailed by billboards and cinema, which, in his shorthand, he calls "America".
His conclusion is that, whatever the sins of the prewar empires he doesn't ignore their sins, for he was now a socialist what has replaced them is something worse: a wrecked, valueless world, caught between bogus political rhetoric on the one hand and, on the other, a fatuous illusionism, a dream world retailed by billboards and cinema, which, in his shorthand, he calls "America".
"History has come to Kipling's rescue," Howe wrote, "What has replaced imperialism has often been something much worse".
(On a side note: With all of these widescreen Windows Mobile handsets making there way out, how is that no one on the dev team has replaced the default backgrounds with something that won't repeat 3/4 of the way down the screen?).
TOM: The things that we saw as the quintessential New York those things that give the accent that may be missing now probably had already replaced something else before those people lamented.
