Quotes About Semantics

jiggery pokery – which is the ancient nomadic term for doing things with words.

On ne peut entreprendre de définir l'être sans tomber dans cette absurdité: car on ne peut définir un mot sans commencer par celui-ci, c'est, soit qu'on l'exprime ou qu'on le sous-entende. Donc pour définir l'être, il faudrait dire c'est, et ainsi employer le mot défini dans sa définition.

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.

The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky.

This or that is proclaimed awesome every second sentence - and we have lost a wonderful English word.

Things mean pretty much what we want them to mean.

Hayakawa asked Carter questions about his book and the nuances of semantics, his specialty. Could any other American president have stayed awake to read the book, much less answer the questions to the senator's satisfaction? Carter did.

words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say [...]

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.

as if the word was a euphemism for some kind of infection.

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

A gloss is a total system of perception and language.

People don't usually think about the meaning of the words they say. It seems to them that words convey truth. That when someone hears the word "red" he will think of a ripe raspberry and not a pool of blood. That the word "love" will evoke Shakespeare's sonnets and not the erotic films of Playboy. And they find themselves baffled when the word they've spoken doesn't evoke the right response.

Acting is fun and I refuse to get involved in the semantics and the politics of strategy and breaking out of something or doing something because you need to do something else. For me it's all about what fuels my soul and if I'm passionate about a screenplay then that's what I'll do next.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

Why do 'slow down' and 'slow up' mean the same thing? Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

Anything means something if you impose meaning on it, which in itself is a meaningless thing, the imposition.

But there are some rare terms that simply don't have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them.

propositional statements

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.

There's a pattern here. In summing up the language of matter, space, and time, I concluded that they are measured by human goals, not just by a scale, a clock, and a tape measure. Now we see that the fourth major category in conceptual semantics, causality, also cares about our intentions and interests.

So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.