Quotes About Meaning

Although 'to paint' means something like to cause to be covered with paint, one does not 'paint a brush' when one dips it in the can, and it is hard to say with a straight face that Michelangelo painted the ceiling when he caused the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered with paint.

Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science

Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future.

The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.

Even the emotional comfort of a belief in an afterlife can go both ways. Would life lose its purpose if we ceased to exist when our brains die? On the contrary, nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

If people are mentally agile enough to interpret events in many ways, what's to prevent a child from interpreting the meaning of to nail as "to obscure a surface by nailing things to it," or to coil as "to cause a long object to have a filament coiled around it"?

Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness.

As Richard Lederer points out in Crazy English, we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway, there is no ham in hamburger or bread in sweetbreads, and blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran. But think about the "sane" alternative of depicting a concept so that receivers can apprehend the meaning in the form.

articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the arbitrariness of the sign," the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means "dog" just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.

The preposition into means "to in," namely, "to an interior portion of "; onto stands for "to on"; with stands for "a means of changing something.

nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

the problem of meaning, like many mysteries in philosophy, may always be shrouded in enigma, because it pushes our common sense into conceptual realms that it did not evolve to think in.

According to Radical Pragmatics, a permanently existing conceptual structure underlying the meaning of a word is also as mythical as the Jack of Spades, because people can use a word to mean almost anything, depending on the context.

grammar specifies how words may combine to express meanings;

If we dig even deeper to the roots of words, we unearth physical metaphors for still more abstract concepts.

an exception: in the sentence I asked him what he thought of my review in his book, and his response was unprintable, the word unprintable means something much more specific than "incapable of being printed.") The

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it is also about the relation of words to other human concerns.

Linguists call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them "conceptual semantics."1 Conceptual semantics—the language of thought—must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean.

Naming a child is the only opportunity that most people get to anoint an entity in the world with a word of their choosing.

A definition is a dictionary's explanation of the meaning of an English word using other English words, intended to be read by a whole person, applying the entirety of his or her intelligence and language skills.

When the term ham sandwich can refer to a man sitting at a lunch counter, there seems to be little hope for the logician's dream that the expressions in a language can be mapped onto states of the world according to a fixed set of pointers.

Without a substrate of thoughts to underlie our words, we do not truly speak but only babble, blabber, blather, chatter, gibber, jabber, natter, patter, prattle, rattle, yammer, or yadda, yadda—an onomatopoeic lexicon for empty speech that makes plain the expectation that the sounds coming out of our mouths are ordinarily about something.

if some metaphors can persist in the language as fossils, it puts every metaphor under a cloud of suspicion.