Quotes About Semantics

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains.

Indian nouns are extremely connotive; that is, the name does more than simply denote the thing to which it belongs - in denoting the object, it also assigns to it some quality or characteristic.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don't care if they make sense or nonsense.

Everything is language.

You think—I dare say that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it We're destroying words—scores of them hundreds of them every day. It's a beautiful thing the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms there are also the antonyms.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

Language communicates the linguistic being of things. The clearest manifestation of this being, however, is language itself. The answer to the question ' What does language communicate?' is therefore 'All language communicates itself.

Der Name ist das innerste Wesen der Sprache.

For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's.

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.

Restatement is like marching in place. It does not have forward movement, but it is part of the parade. It is saying the same thing in different words.

The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over.

Analysis of error begins with analysis of language.

Bullshit then." Carmelo was not a woman bogged down by semantics. "He's fine. Look at him! He's ecstatic. He's euphoric." "For the moment." Carmelo looked at her daughter. "For the moment's all there is, my darling.

Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Triumph of the Molecule.

In my dictionary, and everyone's dictionary in the 1970s, the word 'queer' did mean strange and unusual. There was no slur to it.

There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

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

To Wiccans, a word is not reality itself. For example, the word "apple" is not itself an apple.

My one quarrel is with words.

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious-that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

Scientists and spiritualists often use different vocabularies to describe the exact same mysteries of the universe. The conflicts are frequently over semantics, not substance. - Robert Langdon

Scientists and spiritualists often use different vocabularies to describe the exact same mysteries of the universe. The conflicts are frequently over semantics, not substance.