Quotes About Semantics

Another issue was language, the problem of expressing these themes in language and the problem of how much one can articulate in language.

Insofar as interpretation hits the real, it does not so much hit the truth as create it. For truth exists only within language (it is a property of statements), and thus there is no truth of that which cannot yet be said. Truth is not so much "found" or "uncovered" by interpretation, as created by it.

The very foundation of interhuman discourse is misunderstanding. -Lacan, Seminar III, 184

Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?

The pervert. He prefers to think of himself as sexual deviant. Semantics.

Actually, languages can be very tricky in this respect. The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive but none in which a double positive makes a negative—to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, "Yeah, yeah.

Why are they called buildings when they're already finished? Shouldn't they be called builts?

You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments—the elements of thought—until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language.

There are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance.

She was playing with semantics. I felt certain that she understood the word "tip" in English. She enjoyed pretending that she thought I wanted the Duchess to be upside down with her face buried in the sewage of some manhole while her beautifully shod feet waved desperate high-heels in the air.

Potato. Pa-taw-toe. Ain't much difference

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

True' and 'false' are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither 'truth' nor 'falsehood.

Apple is another word that has always meant itself. In fact, it used to apply to any fruit, vegetable, or even nut. All fruits were apples. The potato was the apple of the earth (and still is in French: pomme de terre). Dates were finger apples. The banana was, in Middle English, the apple of paradise.

Every time you discuss the future [in English], grammatically you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different.

terms tend to become dead counters in a futile, spiritually obstructive semantic game, for they describe mystic experience that cannot be exposed to the common light of day without devaluation and dilution of meaning.

In Tinkham (1993), two experiments compared the learning rates of the same ESL learners who were learning semantically related and then semantically unrelated target vocabulary items. Results of this study showed that the learners were able to learn the semantically unrelated target items much more quickly than they could do with the semantically related items.

Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas and not the ideas themselves.

Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.

You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language.

Language must be taken in a wider sense than speech, for speech is only the outward flow of thoughts formulated for communication