"Even rows of rally participants walked along the streets, the first of them carried a huge banner in front of the formation", "He loved accuracy, so he wrote all letters on clean white paper over a banner", "In order to make a banner, they use liquid crystals", "This is an old film shot when there were no computer technologies yet - using the transparency method". If you have read these sentences and have not found any connection in them, it does not matter. The main thing that you noticed is that each of them uses the word banner. In which case is it used correctly? Again difficult to answer? And again, it's not scary, because after reading the article, you will immediately understand what the matter is and, of course, you will understand what a banner is.
Why the confusion?
Confusion about how to use words correctly and whatthey still mean, sometimes arises as a result of such phenomena in the Russian language as homonymy and polysemy of words. Homonyms are words that are spelled and pronounced the same, but have different meanings. Even in dictionaries, the interpretation of such words is given in different articles. Polysemantic words are separated within the same dictionary entry, because, despite the different meanings, they still have something in common. The word "transparency" is just such a polysemantic word and a homonym at the same time.
What is a banner?
Let's start with perhaps the simplest and most familiar definition. Many people know that a banner is a large canvas that is used for some kind of propaganda or advertising to communicate certain information to a large number of people.
Physicists and lyricists…use banners
In the second sentence that we gave as an example of using the word (about letters), a banner is a device for writing smoothly on unlined paper, it is a dense sheet with clear lines that is placed under that paper on which you need to write something - the stripes shine through and the writer does not stray from the line.
And what kind of banner, for the manufacture of which liquid crystals are needed? Here, physicists will not have such a question, because they themselves have encountered a transparency more than once when they had to determine the characteristics of light. Transparency in physics is a device in the form of a thin plate, thanks to which it is possible to determineproperties of the light beam.
Movie, movie, movie
The last definition of a banner is familiar to filmmakers. Especially those who worked in this field 50 years ago. After all, it was at that time that a banner was often used in combined shooting. This technology was used to substitute an object that does not actually exist in the frame.
