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rittareart In reply to SimoneRebecca [2015-09-11 05:30:16 +0000 UTC]

Thank you!

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rittareart In reply to NiennaBlue [2015-08-23 10:52:29 +0000 UTC]

Закат, вроде)

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rittareart In reply to peet [2015-06-29 12:58:29 +0000 UTC]

Thank you!

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NonieR In reply to Mutantenfisch [2015-06-02 19:08:45 +0000 UTC]

"Plastic"? Alektra007, this must be an idiom that doesn't translate well, unless you're being sarcastic. In normal English usage, to say something looks plastic means that it's clumsily made and looks entirely fake, which is certainly not true of Filat's work.

But now I'm curious; what does the word imply in your language?

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Mutantenfisch In reply to NonieR [2015-06-03 06:50:52 +0000 UTC]

Ah, thanks a lot for this explanation. Of course I didn't mean to call Filat's work fake or badly drawn. It seems rather like I've just stumbled upon another "false friend".

In German, at least in my area, you use "plastisch" for something that looks like you can touch it, even though it is only two-dimensional. So, this counts for drawings as well as for characters or landscapes in a story. They are very realistic, and the viewer gets the feeling of seeing or reading something that could as well stand right in front of them.

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NonieR In reply to Mutantenfisch [2015-06-03 18:30:16 +0000 UTC]

Yes, I thought it might be something like that. Aren't languages fun?

Adjectives based on metaphors can be pretty language-specific, can't they! Like the term for obscene language, which English used to refer to as "salty" (because sailors--"salts"--swore a lot), while other languages refer to similar language as smoky, lemony, or other odd terms.

The nearest English equivalents to that usage of "plastisch" are the obvious terms "realistic" or "believable" or, in some cases, "concrete," which normally refers to a kind of cement-and-sand building material, but is also used for precisely specific imagery (usually in speech, but could be applied to art).

For example, a vague proposal might be "Beautify the city." A CONCRETE proposal would be something like "Take bids on planting redbud trees in the median along Grand Avenue between 1st and 12th Streets; propose an ordinance requiring residents to remove all non-working vehicles from their front yards; and request funds to remove grafitti from public walls."

With art, I don't think we'd just call the art itself concrete, but we might say something like "I love the concrete detail of her chipped fingernails" or "Many superhero stories take place in abstract cityscapes, but Batman's Gotham is usually illustrated with concrete examples of Art Deco and Victorian architecture."


I LOVE language, as you can probably tell. For me, one of the most stunning examples of human language comes from a Nicaraguan school for the deaf, where a combination of previous wartime separation and the administration's insistence on formal finger-spelling left a generation of of deaf children to invent their own ways to communicate with each other, and within two decades they had created a fully functional sign language of their own, including metaphors and puns, past/present/future/conditional tenses, and EVERY other marker of human speech.

Nearer to home, American Sign language also includes dirty puns (there's only a slight difference in thumb position between "slice of pizza" and "vagina") and rude nicknames; since spelling out all the letters of someone's name every time you refer to them would be slow and tedious, you usually use the first letter of their name and a descriptive word (I suspect I'd be "N + wordy", for example), so I'm told the normal term for our crooked ex-president Richard Nixon is "N + lie".

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