Quotes About Semantics

The word, Irene, is stealing." "Oh, semantics. 'I acquire, 'you borrow,' 'she steals,' 'they invade and loot . . .

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

Zechariah 8:3 is very interesting. When God returns to Zion to dwell in the midst of his people, Jerusalem shall be called polls h? al?thin? ("the true city"). Such a saying would be difficult for a Greek unfamiliar with Semitic idiom, and the Greek hardly conveys the meaning of the Hebrew text, that Jerusalem will be a city where people have responded to God's revelation of himself and loyally walk in his precepts.

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

Nobody wants to say that the man [Obama] is a Marxist. Okay, so he's not a Marxist. He's a progressive! This is semantics.

A Yea might turn in to a Nae and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied. In other talk you argument out until you get the answer you want.

Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).

Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty

Words were only an approximation of meaning. The meaning escaped between the words, dissolved, disappeared, like fog fading away between iron bars.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

Words, too, have a genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

There are no such things as synonyms!" he practically shouted.

Incidentally, he might have added, are you aware that there's no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.

Humans assign words to things and pretend the words are adequate.

politicized character of Hindutva-watching leads to unabashed manipulations of the semantics of established terminology.

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

Turkey bacon. It's like saying "shoot" instead of "shit." It just doesn't quite carry the moment.

The phrase "domestic cat" is an oxymoron.

Everything always comes down to language in the end.

The name of a thing is not the thing.

Terminological inexactitude

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.