Polysemous Quotes & Sayings

Walsall have given City more than one anxious moment amongst many anxious moments — Denis Law

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me. — William Faulkner

Something can be symbolic without being a mere stand-in or vessel, which just brings us away from the true mystery and dread, into some boring version of what we already know. So what you say is true, in that the bear is a kind of parallel to the speaker, or imagined as such, but also very different. So if it's a symbol it is - ahem - a polysemous one. — Matthew Zapruder

Margaret Thatcher was beyond argument a great Prime Minister. Her tragedy is that she may be remembered less for the brilliance of her many achievements than for the recklessness with which she later sought to impose her own increasingly uncompromising views. — Geoffrey Howe

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example — Robert Lane Greene

I'm not so much interested in the return ON my money as I am in the return OF my money. — Will Rogers

Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared. — A.S. Byatt

Go make your mark on the world. Be a world changer! Live bold for Christ no matter the cost. — Crystal Woodman Miller

O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity. — William Carlos Williams

...[T]he inherent polysemous character of language and the necessity of interpreting language according to one's personal understandings eliminate the possibility of infusing one's sentiments directly into the mind of another. At the same time, these characteristics of language and its interpretations suggest that no text ought ever to be thought complete. We can never manage to complete our ideas, to work out their full implications, to recognize their inadequacies, or to say what 'we really meant.' Further, since anything we say can be challenged, as Graff (1992b) points out, we can never manage to meet all the possible challenges. Such an idea may seem to be an unbearable problem. But we have always lived with these conditions. We have simply ignored them. — George Hillocks

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch. — Ken Follett

Aunt Mimi possessed a horror of silence, which she battled with endless chat. The Typhoid Mary of the Telephone started her calls at 6:30 each morning. — Rita Mae Brown

I'm certainly very conservative when it comes to education. We're getting rid of Common Core. We're going to have education at a local level. — Donald Trump

Queen's knight," he said quietly. "To queen two." It was, he knew, a dangerous opening. — Diana Gabaldon

Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish. — Philip Yancey