Semantics Quotes

“Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“I penetrated the outer cell membrane with a nanosyringe."
"You poked it with a stick?"
"No!" I said. "Well. Yes. But it was a scientific poke with a very scientific stick.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr.

“Kevyn, Ennesby tells me you are building a time machine.

Actually I'm finished.

In one afternoon? Wow... Does it work?

After a fashion.

...

I put a whole lot of energy into it, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.
-Captain Tagon & Commander Andreyasn”
― Howard Tayler, The Tub of Happiness

“All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.”
― Felix Frankfurter

“Why are some words bad? The idea that they could be bothered me as a kid. Words are strings of sounds. How could sounds be bad? But of course: words aren’t just strings of sound. They are strings of sound to which we attach meaning. And yet it’s not the meaning of words that makes them bad either. Just consider this list: poop, crap, manure, dung, feces, stool. It’s all the same s**t. And yet, it’s only “s**t” we shouldn’t say. Why is that? F**k if I know.”
― Scott Hershovitz, Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids

“Indescribable’ is the only accurate description of life.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“One demonstration is equivalent to one hundred explanations.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The philosopher has a duty,... in reading scientific texts, to combine semantic tolerance with semantic criticism—to accept in practice what he denounces as a matter of principle, namely, the confusions that result from illegitimately converting correlations into identifications.”
― Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain

“...and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on "college life" before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?”
― Grace Metalious, The Tight White Collar

“Being a great writer or speaker requires the appreciation of words, and that of the limits of language.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“After the evasion of the death of the human and that of the human race, the most useful use of words is to show or remind us of the limits of language.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You can say too much without talking too much.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Sometimes it is, unbeknown to us, the name or the nickname, not the person or the thing, that is unknown to us.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The direction towards or away from sleep is what differentiates being half-awake from being half-asleep.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You can know the name, but not understand or know the named.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“That you have to talk about only one thing many times does not mean that you have to say one thing many times.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“So to say that you don't believe in the "supernatural" is a contradiction in terms - because it means that you also don't believe in the "natural". Neither can exist without the other.'
'Oh come on', I said impatiently. 'That's just semantics'.
'Yes, you're right. But the whole world is made up of semantics and yours are those of the seventeenth century. Even though you think you are modern.”
― Amitav Ghosh

“Even the deepest possible description is superficial.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The philosopher has a duty,... in reading scientific texts, to combine semantic tolerance with semantic criticism—to accept in practice what he denounces as a matter of principle, namely, the confusions that result from illegitimately converting correlations into identifications.”
― Paul Ricoœur

“The best argument in favor of the universality of natural language expressive power is the possibility of translation. The best argument against universality is the impossibility of translation.”
― Emmon W. Bach

“Storms. How did you describe taste? "It's like color.. you see with your mouth." [Shallan] grimaced.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the bordering between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention. . . . Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths. in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.”
― Mikhail Bakhtin

“This is not just semantics. Language matters.”
― John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did

“Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation.”
― Matthieu Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering