galanty show
- noun
- Archaic
:
espectáculo de sombras
- As children, we often entertained ourselves by staging a galanty show with paper cutouts and candles.
Examples
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The magician's galanty show filled the walls with fantastic, flickering creatures that seemed to come to life.
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Victorian parlors sometimes featured a galanty show as an evening amusement for guests.
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The galanty show was mesmerizing last night.
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Did you see the galanty shows at the festival?
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We had a great time watching a galanty show at the local theater, where shadows danced on the screen.
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During the party, they set up a galanty show with silhouettes of animals that delighted the children.
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At the art exhibition, a galanty show was displayed, captivating visitors with its enchanting shadow patterns.
Synonyms
1
7.4
A show that uses hand or puppet shadows on a screen to tell a story
A performance that uses figures and light to make moving shadows on a screen
How Elaborate
Surface Forms
Morphology
galanty + show
Although 'show' is a transparent constituent, 'galanty' is an obscure/lexicalized form not found in common dictionaries and bears no obvious compositional relation to 'shadow play'. Because the specific meaning 'figures shown as moving shadows' cannot be derived from the literal constituents, a B1 learner who only knows the parts would not be able to infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Galanty show may come from an old living-room trick where people held paper cutouts near a candle or lamp so their moving shadows fell on a wall or screen. That strong image of figures made only from light and shadow is why the phrase means 'a dramatic performance' of moving shadows today.