Quotes About Semantics

As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness.

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

He also thought that 'abbreviation' was too long for its meaning, that 'monosyllabic' should have one syllable, 'dyslexic' should be renamed 'O' and 'unspeakable' should be respelt 'unsfzpxkable.

All terms with negative prefixes are already stereotyped language.

Acting is fun and I refuse to get involved in the semantics and the politics of strategy and breaking out of something or doing something because you need to do something else. For me it's all about what fuels my soul and if I'm passionate about a screenplay then that's what I'll do next.

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

I know what the structure of the language is.

Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

art, n. This word has no definition.

Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.

Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?

Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed.

any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations.

Word inflation . . . Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.

Neoclassical Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar," "The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema," "The Emergence of Heroic Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment" —' ' "Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality"?' ' "A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass"?' ' "Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica"?

We need an inflation-generative grammar.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

Elk ding is een woord

Le mot 'chat' signifie 'la chose blanche qui ronronne' (lors du cours sur la Métaphysique des Espèces Naturelles, Collège de France 2013-2014)

In metaphor we say what we mean, but we don't mean what we say. In analogy we mean what we say, but we don't know what we mean.