Graffiti is...

[marjoram_blues]

...good for the soul.
It is art and an expression of social/political thought which should be saved.

What is to you, and do you have a favourite piece ? Have you ever scratched, or written anything onto a public wall? Toilet humour ?
Let's be having your own special graffito - get creative, this is the space
You know you really, really wanna let it all hang out...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti

The Guardian seems to be on a roll re WW1 and first-hand testimonials...
by Maev Kennedy.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/m ... ond-castle

In 1916 a conscientious objector, condemned by a tribunal for refusing to serve in the first world war, took up a pencil and very neatly explained his plight on the whitewashed wall of his cell in Richmond Castle in Yorkshire.
“‘I Percy F Goldsbrough of Mirfield was brought up from Pontefract on Friday August 11 1916 and put in this cell for refusing to be made into a soldier,” he wrote.
English Heritage, which now cares for the beautiful medieval castle, will launch a project on Friday to record, research and preserve the fragile walls that became a unique archive of rare first-hand testimonial from men who refused to join the war, as well as thousands of other inscriptions added later
...
“The only War which is worth fighting is the Class War. The Working Class of this Country have no quarrel with the Working Class of Germany or any other Country. Socialism stands for Internationalism. If the workers of all countries united and refused to fight, there would be no war,” one prisoner wrote.
...
RL, one of the few identified prisoners – Richard Lewis Barry, a lace factory worker from Derbyshire – wrote in 1916: “You might as well try to dry a floor by throwing water on it, as try to end this war by fighting.” A 1939 writer, a soldier from the local regiment, added his initials a few inches away, but carefully preserved RL’s thoughts
...

[Pluto]

Good post.

Graffiti is great. The tagging just your call sign:name can be tedious, but on the whole using the public spaces in which we move to communicate anything is good I think. It is anti-power too, in the fact that it's illegal, which is also interesting. The people have no way of communicating as the platforms of communication are owned and run by power's people so to speak. I saw this painted on a wall in Paris during the 2005 riots there and decided to make a painting of it:

paris riot graffiti (2).jpg (50.96 KiB) Viewed 4211 times

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Not when someone paints a meaningless scribble on your fence that you have to paint off. Then it's just vandalism. I haven't seen any intelligent graffiti for years.

[marjoram_blues]

Not when someone paints a meaningless scribble on your fence that you have to paint off. Then it's just vandalism. I haven't seen any intelligent graffiti for years.

Yeah, you are right - graffiti can either brighten, enlighten or blight.
The last time I saw graffiti was when I visited Bristol. There, it is celebrated as street art; think Banksy. Seems that you can now make a professsional career out of it. But is it really then graffiti ?

I prefer spontaneous colourful phrases. Pompeii's ruins have some prime examples, apparently. And in Herculaneum, next to a drawing of a phallus, ' Handle with care'.

I reckon Pluto has his career scrawled out in front of him !

[marjoram_blues]

Good post.

Graffiti is great. The tagging just your call sign:name can be tedious, but on the whole using the public spaces in which we move to communicate anything is good I think. It is anti-power too, in the fact that it's illegal, which is also interesting. The people have no way of communicating as the platforms of communication are owned and run by power's people so to speak. I saw this painted on a wall in Paris during the 2005 riots there and decided to make a painting of it:

paris riot graffiti (2).jpg

Brilliant. At first I thought it was an exhortation to nick some cars.
Trust the French to turn a 4 into a 5- lettered word.
Que diable.

[Melchior]

Graffiti are, not is....

[Gary Childress]

Graffiti are, not is....

In Italian, the word graffiti is a plural noun, and its singular form is graffito. Traditionally, the same distinction has been maintained in English, so that graffiti, being plural, would require a plural verb: ‘the graffiti were all over the wall’. By the same token, the singular would require a singular verb: ‘there was a graffito on the wall’. Today these distinctions survive in some specialist fields such as archaeology, but sound odd to most native speakers. The most common modern use is to treat graffiti as if it were a mass noun, similar to a word like writing, and not to use graffito at all. In this case, graffiti takes a singular verb, as in ‘the graffiti was all over the wall’. Such uses are now widely accepted as standard and may be regarded as part of the natural development of the language, rather than as mistakes. A similar process is going on with other words such as agenda, data, and media.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/de ... h/graffiti

[Harbal]

In Italian, the word graffiti is a plural noun, and its singular form is graffito. Traditionally, the same distinction has been maintained in English, so that graffiti, being plural, would require a plural verb: ‘the graffiti were all over the wall’. By the same token, the singular would require a singular verb: ‘there was a graffito on the wall’. Today these distinctions survive in some specialist fields such as archaeology, but sound odd to most native speakers. The most common modern use is to treat graffiti as if it were a mass noun, similar to a word like writing, and not to use graffito at all. In this case, graffiti takes a singular verb, as in ‘the graffiti was all over the wall’. Such uses are now widely accepted as standard and may be regarded as part of the natural development of the language, rather than as mistakes. A similar process is going on with other words such as agenda, data, and media.

Well done, Gary. Somebody needs to take on the pedants.

[marjoram_blues]

Graffiti are, not is....

graffiti rocks
on
graffiti rock

No mata
No grama

Hello Melchior, thanks for dripping by.
Would you scrawl that on a wall?

Some people like freedom with their words
And how they place their thoughts.
Some people let their ears do the riting
The right thing to do
If is/are a noise you
Is
Think
Duz it mata
In the drama
Of life.

As Jack Kerouac wrote:
....there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

Clearly, grammar rules are great in the main, for order and sense. But to nit pick is to picnic what ants are.
Nique Grama Rools !

[marjoram_blues]

In Italian, the word graffiti is a plural noun, and its singular form is graffito. Traditionally, the same distinction has been maintained in English, so that graffiti, being plural, would require a plural verb: ‘the graffiti were all over the wall’. By the same token, the singular would require a singular verb: ‘there was a graffito on the wall’. Today these distinctions survive in some specialist fields such as archaeology, but sound odd to most native speakers. The most common modern use is to treat graffiti as if it were a mass noun, similar to a word like writing, and not to use graffito at all. In this case, graffiti takes a singular verb, as in ‘the graffiti was all over the wall’. Such uses are now widely accepted as standard and may be regarded as part of the natural development of the language, rather than as mistakes. A similar process is going on with other words such as agenda, data, and media.

Well done, Gary. Somebody needs to take on the pedants.

Yeah, thanks Gary and Harbal. Anyfink else u wanna add to the thread topic while yooz is hear?

[Harbal]

I reckon Pluto has his career scrawled out in front of him !

Letting Pluto loose with a can of paint near any wall of mine doesn't bear thinking about.

[marjoram_blues]

I reckon Pluto has his career scrawled out in front of him !

Letting Pluto loose with a can of paint near any wall of mine doesn't bear thinking about.

It could be worth millions, sell brick by brick.

[Harbal]

It could be worth millions, sell brick by brick.

I've seen enough examples of Pluto's work to be under any illusion about the effect it would have on the value of my property.

[marjoram_blues]

It could be worth millions, sell brick by brick.

I've seen enough examples of Pluto's work to be under any illusion about the effect it would have on the value of my property.

Would you have a Banksy?
Or any kind of mural?
I'm guessing flat plain.

[marjoram_blues]

It could be worth millions, sell brick by brick.

I've seen enough examples of Pluto's work to be under any illusion about the effect it would have on the value of my property.

I'm talking about if he were famous and graffed on a piece of garden wall...
I would think that of value.
But then again, someone might beat me to it
And I'd need
Another brick in the wall.