Quotes About Interpretation

Rather, there is friction between the speaker's square peg and the listener's round hole, and that friction itself conveys information in a parallel stream.

The errors could have been avoided by mentally moving the who or whom back into the gap and sounding out the sentence (or, if your intuitions about who and whom are squishy, inserting he or him in the gap instead).

The authors of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, having surveyed the uses of the two forms over six hundred years, conclude, "The traditional rules about shall and will do not appear to have described real usage of these words precisely at any time, although there is no question that they do describe the usage of some people some of the time and that they are more applicable in England than elsewhere.

Among Whorf's "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions

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"?

The danger, sometimes called the Value Alignment Problem, is that we might give an AI a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned.

Moving" and "changing" are not enough grounds for the mind to construe an event in a particular way. It also cares about finer-grained concepts like forcing versus enabling a force, causing versus letting, and before-and-after versus at-the-same-time.

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.

And fifth, the promiscuous verbs and monogamous verbs seem to convey the same kinds of meanings.

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

sarchasm n. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

If you ignore all the years in which an indicator of some problem declines, and report every uptick (since, after all, it's "news"), readers will come away with the impression that life is getting worse and worse even as it gets better and better. In the first six months of 2016 the New York Times pulled this trick three times, with figures for suicide, longevity, and automobile fatalities.

Where they differ is in the construal of those facts: how the intricate swirl of matter in space ought to be conceptualized by human minds.

language is above all a medium in which we express our thoughts and feelings, and it mustn't be confused with the thoughts and feelings themselves.

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

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.

The overall picture that has emerged from the study of the compassionate brain is that there is no empathy center with empathy neurons, but complex patterns of activation and modulation that depend on perceivers' interpretation of the straits of another person and the nature of their relationship with the person.

If I use the verb pour, my field of vision narrows to how the water is caused to move, ignoring its destination; that's the reason we can say pour the water but not pour the glass. But if I use the verb fill, my field of vision narrows to the resulting fullness of the glass, ignoring the trajectory of the water; that's why we say fill the glass but not fill the water.

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

the mind is a metaphor-monger

Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak it.

people could not analyse their metaphors if they didn't command an underlying medium of thought that is more abstract than the metaphors themselves.

Thinking can not trade in metaphors directly. It must trade in a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic […] while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.