Quotes About Semantics

General Semantics has influenced recent psychology and social science greatly but has had little effect on physical sciences or education and virtually no effect on the problems it attempted to alleviate — i.e., the omnipresence of unacknowledged bigotry and unconscious prejudice in most human evaluations.

language controls our thinking.

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say I love fish, and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.

Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.

In the world of identity, utterances have functions, separate from their meanings.

We allow words to obscure the interpretation of the deeper meaning.

Não se pode explicar alguma coisa meramente lhe dando um nome.

Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence -- by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present -- but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word "quarters" the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.

Than is both a conjunction and a preposition; it's a floor wax and a dessert topping.

Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.

Words will do that. We are a naming species, and what we call things influences the way we think about them and the experiments we deem worthy of doing.

Could' and 'is' are so far apart as to be opposites." "No," she says. " 'Is' and 'isn't' are opposites.

No one is yet using figuratively to mean literally; the confusion, such as it is, is all in one direction.

You know, funny is this weird word for me. I hear is so many times it has no meaning anymore.

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.

Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions.

Designer' is meant to mean whatever it means.

Don't hate the word, playa; hate the dictionary.

Funny how words in one language get used in another language. For example, 'scotch' in Russian is tape and 'pampers' means diapers.

Nothing always means something.