Quotes About Definition

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. [ Inigo Montoya ]

You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does." "How

You keep that saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Why does everything have to be put into boxes?" they say. & fair enough, up to a point. But this vigorous drive to divide, subdivide & label has been rather maligned. Such conceptual shuffling is inevitable, & a reasonable defence against what would otherwise face us as thoroughgoing chaos.

He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.

When I think of the definition of cool and when I look at people, John Travolta is really the definition of cool because, not only is he great in all his movies, but, as a person, he's just really cool.

How strange. The power of the spirit over the permanence of celluloid. A fantasy, fixed in time yet fleeting. The spirit. He pauses & nods perceptibly. The Spirit is the Reader. What the reader constructs is the Other, & the Other is contained in his flight, the definition of the Other is flight. To fix the Other is to lose him, to let him flee & grow is to keep him.

De même, il se fait couramment une confusion entre les femmes d'ouvriers et les ouvrières, appartenance de classe tantôt sur une définition marxiste de la classe - sur leur rapport de production - tantôt en reprenant à son compte la définition des femmes comme propriété et extension du mari.

Toute science construit son objet. Ceci signifie que non seulement son contenu théorique mais les limites et la définition de son champ d'application, son domaine même, loin de préexister à la discipline, en sont une création.

He concluded that language, specifically the act of naming something with a word, helps categorize.

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it or you don't. You can't attain it. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.

The final story of randomness—utter chaos—has not yet been told to us by the mathematicians. It seems remarkable that something so fundamental for probability theory has not been defined and even more remarkable that we can go so far in mathematics lacking a definition. By simply assuming randomness exists, mathematicians assign elementary probabilities to events, and that is their starting point. But they have not captured chaos and looked it in the eye.

And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.

Scholars have produced as many definitions of myth as there are myths themselves. This book will discuss various definitions of myth as it goes along, but it is interested in myth as a process as much as a thing.

Of course, if 40% of women need oxytocin to progress normally, then something is wrong with the definition of normal.

The unsatisfactoriness of definitions of poetry arises usually from one or other of two causes. If the definition is that of a critic, it is the resultant of a long analytical process, and therefore not very intelligible apart from the process by which it has been arrived at; if it is the definition of a poet, it is certain to contain that element of poetry which it professes to explain.

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

Johnson the poet recognizes that there are times when a little scientific precision may be sacrificed in the interests of a memorable formula. Thus 'to hiccough' is 'to sob with convulsion of the stomach', while an 'embryo' is 'the offspring yet unfinished in the womb'. 'Thumb' is defined simply as 'the short strong finger answering to the other four'. A 'puppet' is 'a wooden tragedian'.

Obsession' is explained as 'the act of besieging' or 'the first attack of Satan, antecedent to possession'—a pair of definitions together more eloquent than the whole of Fatal Attraction.

As we have seen before, this finely tuned judgement also allows Johnson to discriminate deftly between the different senses of a particular word. Thus there are sixteen senses of 'world', ranging from 'the great collective idea of all bodies whatever' to 'the earth; the terraqueous globe'

Ayn Rand defines "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep."3 "Value" denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity's action is directed to acquiring or preserving

The world is not waiting for a new definition of the Gospel, but for a new demonstration of the power of the Gospel.

Why should we consider defining intelligence as something global and as something that hasn't actually yet appeared on Earth? It may be useful for envisioning the future of our own civilization and any others that may be out there among the stars. It might give us something to strive for.