What is "erasure"

Erasure \E*ra"sure\ (?; 135), n. [From Erase.]

1. The act of erasing; a scratching out; obliteration.

2. the place where something has been erased.

"an erasing, an obliterating," 1734, from erase + -ure.

n. 1 The action of erasing; deletion; obliteration. 2 The state of having been erased; total blankness. 3 The place where something has been erased. 4 (context sociology English) A tendency to ignore or conceal an element of society.

1. n. a correction made by erasing; "there were many erasures in the typescript"

2. a surface area where something has been erased; "another word had been written over the erasure"

3. deletion by an act of expunging or erasing [syn: expunction, expunging]

Erasure are an English synthpop duo, consisting of singer and songwriter Andy Bell and songwriter and keyboardist Vince Clarke. They formed in London, and entered the music scene in 1985 with their debut single " Who Needs Love Like That". Following the release of their fourth single " Sometimes", the duo established itself on the UK Singles Chart and became one of the most successful artists of the late 1980s to mid-1990s.

From 1986 to 2007, Erasure achieved 24 consecutive Top 40 hits in the UK, while having three Top 20 hits in the US (on the Billboard Hot 100): " A Little Respect", " Chains of Love", and " Always". By 2009, 34 of their 45 singles and EPs (of which 8 out of the 45 were not chart eligible in the UK) had made the UK Top 40, with 17 climbing into the Top 10. At the 1989 Brit Awards, Erasure won the Brit Award for Best British Group.

The duo are most popular in their native UK and mainland Europe (especially Germany, Denmark and Sweden) and also in South America (especially Argentina, Chile and Peru). To date, they have sold over 25 million albums worldwide. The band is also popular within the LGBT community, for whom the openly gay Bell has become a gay icon.

Erasure is a form of found poetry or found art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.

Here is a nonce example using text from the November 2003 version of the English Wikipedia Main Page:

Several contemporary writer/artists have adopted this form to achieve a range of cognitive or symbolic effects.

In mathematical logic, a logical system has the erasure property if and only if no subset of the propositions can be added to another subset of the propositions to refute a consequence.

For instance, if proposition A means "the store is open from 8:00 to 22:00" and proposition B means "except Tuesdays", the system AB does not have erasure.

Erasure is a 2001 novel by Percival Everett and originally published by UPNE. The novel reacts against the dominant strains of discussion surrounding the publication and criticism of African American literature.

Erasure was the seventh studio album by Erasure, released in 1995. It was produced by Thomas Fehlmann (of The Orb) and Gareth Jones.

An overtly experimental and introspective album, Erasure contains eleven, mostly mid-tempo tracks that differed from their past output of shiny, three-minute pop songs. Most tracks clocked in at five minutes or more, several contained long synth interludes, and guest artists included the London Community Gospel Choir and performance artist Diamanda Galás.

Although appreciated for its experimental nature, Erasure marked the beginning of Erasure's slide from the peak of their popularity in the mainstream music world. Coming off four consecutive number-one albums in the UK, this album failed to hit the top ten and two single releases also missed the UK top ten. After a successful top twenty debut on the Billboard 200 for their previous album I Say I Say I Say, Erasure debuted and peaked at number eighty-two in the U.S. and generated no Hot 100 singles. In Germany the album also peaked lower than previous albums, at number eighty-seven.

Some polls have shown this album to be a favourite among fans of the band.

In an interview with DJ Ron Slomowicz circa 2006, Erasure was asked for their favourite album from their own catalogue. Bell stated "It's a toss-up between "Chorus" and the self-titled "Erasure" album from 1995."

Erasure is an English pop group.

Erasure may also refer to:

• Erasure (album), an album by the British group Erasure
• Erasure (logic), a property of logical systems
• Erasure (novel) a novel by Percival Everett
• Erasure channel (disambiguation), a communication channel model wherein errors are described as erasures
• Erasure code, a forward error correction (FEC) code for the binary erasure channel
• Erasure (artform), a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text
• Type erasure, a process by which explicit type annotations are removed from a program
• Erasure (heraldry), the removal of portions of charges in heraldry

Erasure in blazonry, the language of heraldry, is the tearing off of part of a charge, leaving a jagged edge of it remaining. Due to the usual construction of blazons, this is most often found in its adjectival form (i.e., erased), usually applied to animate charges, most often used of heads but sometimes other body parts. When a tree or other plant is shown uprooted (with the bare roots showing), it is eradicated.

The term erased is most often used of an animal's head, when the neck is depicted with a ragged edge as if forcibly torn from the body. Erased heads are distinct from those couped, in that the former are cut off along a jagged line while the latter are cut off along a straight line.

John Craig's dictionary of 1854 says: