Quotes About Semantics

what you can't understand you can make mean anything.

A quello che non capisci puoi dare qualunque significato.

Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

Logos is a Greek word which denotes meaning.

Seit ich weiss, dass man mit Text nichts mitteilen kann, kann ich Texte verstehen.

He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on the card.

realidade (uma das poucas palavras que só fazem sentido entre aspas)

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.

There it was again, another strange usage. 'We had words.' Everyone has words...What a useless euphemism. The phrases that people used to make things prettier never worked.

No one uses words correctly and if you call them on it, they claim that words are fungible, that it's oppressive and prissy not to let words mean whatever the speaker wishes them to mean.

The destructive potential of language is contained within the very nature of representation. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinite of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories.

morphological

The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.

Number is different from quantity.

the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue.

Names are not the things they name. Classes are not coextensive with subclasses.

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

Miscommunication is endless.

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man on the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.

The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.

Hey, Serge, I just realized that 'slow up' and 'slow down' mean the same thing. That's fucked.