Word of the Day

[GepperRankins]

dick'ed

[DorisInsinuate]

Cuntswallop.

[hobbes]

chiaroscuro


By simply turning the model and not moving the light source, you create chiaroscuro or more chiaroscuro. Note in these two images the more defined Rembrandt lighting on the left image, than on the right, both still are examples of Rembrandt lighting. Both images have chiaroscuro, which in Italian means the interaction of shadows and lights, but because there is more chiaroscuro on the image on the right, the model is more flattering and the image has more impact than the one on the left.

[Gripper]

hoi pol·loi Pronunciation Key (hoi p-loi)
n.

The common people; the masses.


[Greek, the many : hoi, nominative pl. of ho, the; see so- in Indo-European Roots + polloi, nominative pl. of polus, many; see pel-1 in Indo-European Roots.]

Usage Note: Hoi polloi is a borrowing of the Greek phrase hoi polloi, consisting of hoi, meaning “the” and used before a plural, and polloi, the plural of polus, “many.” In Greek hoi polloi had a special sense, “the greater number, the people, the commonalty, the masses.” This phrase has generally expressed this meaning in English since its first recorded instance, in an 1837 work by James Fenimore Cooper. Hoi polloi is sometimes incorrectly used to mean “the elite,” possibly because it is reminiscent of high and mighty or because it sounds like hoity-toity. ·Since the Greek phrase includes an article, some critics have argued that the phrase the hoi polloi is redundant. But phrases borrowed from other languages are often reanalyzed in English as single words. For example, a number of Arabic noun phrases were borrowed into English as simple nouns. The Arabic element al- means “the,” and appears in English nouns such as alcohol and alchemy. Thus, since no one would consider a phrase such as “the alcohol” to be redundant, criticizing the hoi polloi on similar grounds seems pedantic.