Quotes About Semantics

I don't understand the word 'hunk.'

Words were so puzzling. Present should mean a present just as attack should mean to stick tacks in people.

Ama sözlerin bir anlam?, bir de?eri vard? hala. Onlar, -sözler, anlamlar?,- kolay kolay ölmüyor.

It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. If the—if he—if "is" means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.

The fact that the word revolution originally meant restoration is more than a mere oddity of semantics.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

A rose may be a rose may be a rose; but not this one. Clearly it stands for something more.

Indio... was devoid of any semantic allusion to African heritage and would, thus, accord with their negrophobic definition of Dominicanness.

And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.

but the story's interest lies in my struggle over semantics and the moral resonance of interpreting the meaning of a word.

Call it what you like.

Good, because words are important, Trafford. Clear thinking. Logic. Precision. Above all, understanding. You can understand nothing if words can mean anything.

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.

Words contract a significance which clings to them long after the condition of things to which they owe it has passed away.

'Earth' is a silly name for this planet.

There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.

There is no other language as similar to Hebrew like Arabic.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)

So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things.