Quotes About Semantics

Unlike her judges, she suggested that words do not have set meanings, that there is a gap between speaker and listener, and that human understanding always "falls short of absolute truth.

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

y he aquí otro ejemplo de lo hiperbólico que se nos ha vuelto el idioma en manos de los periodistas ¿una masacre de cuatro? Eso es puro desinflamiento semántico…

But one does have to give words some credit. One has to at least pretend that they more or less resemble their meaning. Their shady meaning.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning and meanings differently arranged have a different effect.

Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.

Metaphysics is never more than semantic pleasantries anyway.

He said true things, but called them by wrong names.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Not the measure of words is necessary, but their meaning.

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive

There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.

True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.

Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

The language doesn't mean anything anymore, folks. Truth doesn't mean anything anymore.

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity

polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.

hanged. 'It was disclosed that a young white official had been found hanged to death in his cell …' (The New York Times). 'Hanged to death' is redundant. So too, for that matter, are 'starved to death' and 'strangled to death'. The writer was correct, however, in saying that the official had been found hanged and not hung. People are hanged; pictures and the like are hung.

But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all.

Sweetheart was originally sweetard