Quotes About Semantics

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

Words take on many different meanings.

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.

Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words.

It's interesting how people are sensitive to language and how it works.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck.

You are a schmuck," I informed the hero. "You're not using the word correctly," he said. "Yes I am," I said.

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

To speak is to fall into tautology.

Parlare é incorrere in tautologie.

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

Joseph Devlin

Go home, Butch. I'm not going to do anything stupid. [Vishous to Butch] Stupider, you mean. Semantics are for shit.

One step toward defining anything is to determine what it is not. A popular approach to the word pornography is an appeal to its ancient Greek roots. This approach should be discarded. The word pornography originally meant "writing about harlots or prostitutes." But its meaning has evolved over centuries of use through dozens of different cultures. Like the Greek word gymnasium, which originally meant, "place of nakedness," the word pornography has lost its connection with the past.

The only ill-chosen word in that sentence was "quasi.

Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically ' they really mean, 'not really.'

Translation is meaning.