Quotes About Semantics

Gustavo Solivellas dice: "El mapa no es el territorio" (Alfred Korzybski)

A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.

It was just that the literal meaning itself wasn´t immediately comprehensible. That doesn´t mean it didn´t mean.

I've spent enough time studying languages to know that almost any phrase can have two meanings

I think what's really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we're starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren't semantically intelligent.

If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.

We are now more conscious of the problem of communication itself even in our own language. Familiar words have lost their meaning for many; or the same word means different things to different people. Jargon and cliches usurp the place of discriminating speech in many areas of life.

The degree to which language exactly mirrors reality is debatable.

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.

Call it that if you like. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called model agnosticism and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski , the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, The map is not the territory. Alan Watts , a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as The menu is not the meal.

If the word ''fuck'' is ''obscene'' or ''dirty'', why isn't the word ''duck'' 75% ''dirty''?

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such asexpropriating the expropriators, an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty, they did it to me so I can do it to them, and, in general, the emotional mathematics of one plus one equals zero (1 + 1 = 0). The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc.

NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions.

I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me. Stated thusly, it is true (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the is of identity from the English language. (The is of identity takes the form X is a Y. E.g., Joe is a Communist, Mary is a dumb file-clerk, The universe is a giant machine, etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words is or to be and the Bourland proposal (English without isness) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

Everybody understands that you cannot drink the word water, and yet virtually nobody seems entirely free of semantic delusions entirely comparable to trying to drink the ink-stains that form the word water on this page or the sound waves produced when I say water aloud. If you say, The word is not the thing, everybody agrees placidly; if you watch people, you see that they continue to behave as if something called Sacred really is Sacred and something called Junk really is Junk.

I avoid making sentences with "is" or its relatives in them because all such sentences have definite semantic defects, the first of which consists in the fact that they make it appear as if one has reached the unreachable 1/1 of proven truth, when in fact one usually only has strong maybe, and (especially in politics and Ideology) sometimes only a weak maybe.

Do people only re-act as if words really equal things ("sticks and stones may break my bones, and names can also hurt me") in such "touchy" areas? Try opening two restaurants and have the menu in one say "Chef's special: Tender, juicy filet mignon" and have the other menu say "Chefs special: a hunk of dead meat hacked off a castrated bull." Both phrases describe the same nonverbal event, but see which sells better.

Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

Whatever you say it is, it isn't," Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves.

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this level. As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.