Quotes About Semantics

She thought there was no greater violence than the one done to meaning.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

Chinese Room

eager' and 'anxious' aren't the same, or how 'disinterested' doesn't mean 'uninterested.

Rhyme said, "'Game' is a noun. I don't accept it as a verb. But I will concede that many people use it. The Jargonites, I call them.

The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Literally' - I'm not having it; people can't go around saying 'literally.' Otherwise, what's literal? There's not another word for literally: if it isn't figurative or metaphorical, what is it? It's literal: there's no substitute.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk?

The fact is that none of us can unilaterally decide what a word means. Meanings of words are shared between people - they are a kind of social contract we all agree to - otherwise communication would not be possible.

Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it

the common Greek term for "slave," andrapodon, "man-footed creature," was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, "four-footed creature.

i've heard this called st. peter's square, arlene said. but it isn't square. it's oval.

They also set a pattern that has since become familiar—when trouble came, the overt, political officers of the visible government almost invariably would say they had no advance warning. The CIA in turn would say it had provided adequate warning. The public would be left to take its choice, provided it could weave its way through the maze of self-serving semantics from both sides.

None of these classy locutions mean anything different from the simpler ones they replace. They work ceremonially, not semantically. Writing in a classy way to sound smart means writing to sound like, maybe even be, a certain kind of person. Sociologists, and other scholars, do that because they think (or hope) that being the right kind of person will persuade others to accept what they say as a persuasive social science argument.

Words are, of themselves, meaningless. We invest them with meaning, and, over time, come to feel as if certain words mean certain things. We construct dictionaries and then think they tell us what words mean, but dictionaries are mere historical documents, museums of meaning...

Language and how close it comes to truth, and how far away it is.

In countries where there are no horses, donkeys are called horses.

En los países en donde no hay caballos, a los burros se les llama caballos.

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

If all of this seems paradoxical, get used to it. Language is paradox.

Reactionary conservatives are smiling through the racial apocalypse. To them, race baiting is a joke, as 'humorist' Rush Limbaugh will tell you when he's calling Mexicans 'stupid.' Or it's a matter of semantics when they claim that Sonia Sotomayor is a 'racialist' which, far as I can tell, is the smooth jazz version of being a racist.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.