Photography and composition

The twenty-third entry is o detalhe nas sombras, and the noun inside it is the place where English has one word too many. A sombra does every job at once: the dark shape a thing throws on the ground, a sombra da árvore no chão; the cool place a person stands in, sentar-se à sombra; and the dark end of a photograph, which is what this entry means. English splits that between « shadow » and « shade », and the two do not change places — a tree casts a shadow and gives shade, and nobody sits in a shadow or lifts the shade detail of a picture. The oddity is that they began as one noun. Old English had sceadu with an oblique form sceadwe, and the language ended up keeping both shapes and handing each one half of the meaning: the outline went to « shadow », the shelter to « shade ». For this list only one of them is right. The dark parts of a picture are the shadows, so Puxei o detalhe nas sombras is: I lifted the shadow detail.