Quotes About Semantics

That depends on what your definition of 'is' is.

It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is.

Words differently arranged have different meanings, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

Batter-Sea is not a word,' I said at last. 'It has no referent. There is nothing in the World corresponding to that combination of sounds.

Why even call it a fuck? Why not be clear and call it a seminal emission in a preapproved orifice?

A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who's forgotten words so I can have a word with him?8

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

Men create oppositions, which are not; and put them into new terms, so fixed, as whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning.

The text is not inserted into a genetic process in which it is understood as emerging from this or that prior moment of form or style; nor is it 'extrinsically' related to some ground or context which is at least initially given as something lying beyond it. Rather, the data of the work are interrogated in terms of their formal and logical and, most particularly, their semantic conditions of possibility.

Nonsense. Balderdash. Figgldygrak. Isn't it odd that gibberish words are often the sounds of other words, cut up and dismembered, then stitched into something like them—yet wholly unlike them at the same time?

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today, and how it has changed along the way. The word 'nice' is a positive word today, but hundreds of years ago, it meant 'stupid.'

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.

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

Kanal' means 'sewer' as well as 'channel'. 'Kanakafü' has echoes of 'Kacke', a baby word for faeces.

Another study, in which participants were asked to determine whether or not a capital letter in a word was a vowel or consonant (jewEl, fAble, oRacle, breaTh) found that it strongly disrupted subsequent semantic processing of unconsciously encountered words. In other words, the ability to determine the meaning in words, at an unconscious level, was inhibited.

The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.

Dictionary of Misunderstood Words

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

meanings are neither randomly bestowed by readers, nor objectively there on the page in the sense that a watermark is.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Adjectives are not arguments.

key linguistic concepts and theories related to Arabic in a coherent way,