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A phenomenon (pl.: phenomena), sometimes spelled phaenomenon, is an observable event. [1] The term came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant , who contrasted it with the noumenon , which cannot be directly observed.
Image of a real apple (left), and plastic food model apple (right). The fake apple is a simulacrum. A simulacrum (pl.: simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin simulacrum, meaning "likeness, semblance") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. [1]
The word is both plural and singular. [2] One definition for ephemera is "the minor transient documents of everyday life". [3] [4] Ephemera are often paper-based, printed items, including menus, ticket stubs, newspapers, postcards, posters, sheet music, stickers, and greeting cards. However, since the 1990s, the term has been used to refer to ...
The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert. The plural is also more common with irregular plurals for various attributions: women killers are women who kill, whereas woman killers are those who kill women.
These cases are described with the terms collective number and singulative number. Some languages may possess a massive plural and a numerative plural, the first implying a large mass and the second implying division (like the English modifer "respective[ly]"). For example, "the [combined] waters of the Atlantic Ocean" versus, "the waters of ...
The fully anglicised word pentiment (plural pentiments) is much rarer, though included in the Grove Dictionary of Art. The distinction between singular and plural is also rather flexible; some writers refer to a change of just one outline as pentimenti , whilst others treat each area that has been changed as a single pentimento .
In linguistics, blocking is the morphological phenomenon in which a possible form for a word cannot surface because it is "blocked" by another form whose features are the most appropriate to the surface form's environment. [1] More basically, it may also be construed as the "non-occurrence of one form due to the simple existence of another." [2]
A theory of art is intended to contrast with a definition of art. Traditionally, definitions are composed of necessary and sufficient conditions, and a single counterexample overthrows such a definition. Theorizing about art, on the other hand, is analogous to a theory of a natural phenomenon like gravity.