Semantic Quotes & Sayings

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end. — Don Paterson

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot. — Robert Anton Wilson

The idea of reputation, influence, and influencers in the offline world is as old as the hills. It's not new on the web either, but semantic search is creating a portable sense of identity, reputation, and influence that in the days before it simply did not exist. And this is changing everything — David Amerland

Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's owns' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a natural 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

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. — Theodore Dalrymple

Real search is about providing valuable information when it's really needed to those who are actually looking for it. — David Amerland

Semantic search is a holistic effort by Google (primarily) to understand who you are and what you do across the web. — David Amerland

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. — Noam Chomsky

Having Simultanagnosia (object blindness), Prosopagnosia (face blindness) and Semantic Agnosia (meaning blindness) goes in my favour with regards to abstract art living in world full of fragmented pieces when I draw it is in real time no visual memory means no "pre-formatted" picture in my mind so I go where my hand takes it's like journey that is happening in the moment, hence why I drew these without my lenses on. When I was younger I would draw pictures by "route" which made it a appear that I had a visual memory (cobbling together things out of context and making a contextual image) — Paul Isaacs

Everything that happens now in the online world is part of a conversation. — David Amerland

At its most basic level semantic search applies meaning to the connections between the different data nodes of the Web in ways that allow a clearer understanding of them than we have ever had to date. — David Amerland

The literati in their cellarsPerform semantic tarantellas.I wish I did it half as well as them. — Al Stewart

An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions. — Alfred Korzybski

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator's felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney — Siri Hustvedt

If we, who live outside asylums, act as if we lived in a fictitious world- that is to say, if we are consistent with our beliefs- we cannot adjust ourselves to actual conditions, and so fall into many avoidable semantic difficulties. But the so-called normal person practically never abides by his beliefs, and when his beliefs are building for him a fictitious world, he saves his neck by not abiding by them. A so-called "insane" person acts upon his beliefs, and so cannot adjust himself to a world which is quite different from his fancy. — Alfred Korzybski

Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible ... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration. — Edward Said

Modernist discourse [ ... ] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open. — Phillip E. Johnson

There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word. Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is simple repetition: tree + tree + tree = forest; more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness and east + east = everywhere. The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look. — James Gleick

At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business. — David Foster Wallace

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. — Tim Berners-Lee

Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite. — Akira Mizuta Lippit

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences. — Alain Badiou

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

In the morning I'm often anti-semantic. — John D. MacDonald

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components ... the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component. — Noam Chomsky

Reporting concepts as well as the relationships between concepts and other semantic meaning. — Anonymous

Ever since I was a child I have been a strong believer in the principle that to under-stand how anything works you need to take it apart and look at it in detail. This principle that worked with toys also works pretty well with search. — David Amerland

Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding, because fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complete set of information. We remember information best when it is delivered in the form of a plot, which is called 'semantic memory.' Stories still serve a definitive purpose and the stronger the purpose, the clearer the story.

Fire Up Your Writing Brain — Susan Reynolds

We shall have to stop thinking of technology as something invulnerable that is merely used by humans, and view it as part of a greater cybernetic ecology all around us. The key distinction in an environment is not between 'natural' and 'artificial', but between semantic and dynamic: intention and behaviour. Biology has already drawn these lines, and through us, it will integrate the inanimate with the animate in information systems, until we no longer see a pertinent difference between the two. — Mark Burgess

The content you create and then share is part of your digital identity. It helps those who consume it to understand who you are, why you do the things you do and what values you stand for. As a result content is the primary means through which you establish your online identity, create your reputation and generate the all essential sense of trust without which nothing else can take place. — David Amerland

Everything you see in the world around you is content of some kind. The clothes you wear, the songs you sing, the ads you watch, the food you buy, the tunes you hum and the memes you share. Everything is a signal that sends a message. — David Amerland

Hence, contrary to the conclusion arrived at by the public goods theorists, logic forces one to accept the result that only a pure market system can safeguard the rationality, from the point of view of the consumers, of a decision to produce a public good. And only under a pure capitalist order could it be ensured that the decision about how much of a public good to produce (provided it should be produced at all) would be rational as well. 17 No less than a semantic revolution of truly Orwellian dimensions would be required to come up with a different result. Only if one were willing to interpret someone's "no" as really meaning "yes," the "nonbuying of something" as meaning that it is really "preferred over that which the nonbuying person does instead of nonbuying," of "force" really meaning "freedom," of "noncontracting" really meaning "making a contract" and so on, could the public goods theorists' point be "proven. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I believe the deeply rooted semantic confusion between 'man' as a male and 'man' as a species has been fed back into and vitiated a great deal of the speculation that goes on about the origins, development, and nature of the human race. — Elaine Morgan

To read is to struggle to name, to subject the sentences of a text to a semantic transformation. This transformation is erratic; it consists in hesitating among several names: if we are told that Sarrasine had 'one of those strong wills that know no obstacle'. what are we to read? will, energy, obstinacy, stubbornness, etc.? — Roland Barthes

In many ways semantic search takes us back to the golden days of the Web when in terms of working online anything was possible as long as you had passion, belief in yourself, and energy to work at it. — David Amerland

By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice. — Thomas Szasz

Memory means different things to psychologists. Autobiographical memory is an interesting case because it straddles the most basic of the distinctions that scientists make between types of memory: that between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events). Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory). Another important distinction is that between explicit or declarative memory (in which the contents of memory are accessible to consciousness) and implicit or non-declarative memory (which is unconscious). As we will see, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of how memory is affected by trauma and extreme emotion. — Charles Fernyhough

Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand the abyss separating Sabina and Franz: he listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them. — Milan Kundera

As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances. — Alfred Korzybski

Metaphysics is never more than semantic pleasantries anyway. — Haruki Murakami

The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a 'semantic disturbance' is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized. — Alfred Korzybski

It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life. — Alfred Korzybski

The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible. — Anatol Rapoport

The social media web is a very noisy one indeed and making sure that you are heard requires you to shout more effectively, rather than louder. — David Amerland

'Constitutional' is just a real pip of a word. Positively rolls off the tongue. In fact, it's downright fun to say. 'Con-stit-too-shun-al.' It's the verbal equivalent of skipping down the street with an ice cream cone in your hand. It's like a semantic bag of Lays potato chips. You simply can't just say it once. — Paul Feig

I am a firm believer that knowledge is power but only if it leads to comprehension. — David Amerland

People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. — Chip Heath

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. — Don DeLillo

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree - make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to. — Elon Musk

Dostoevsky's work contains no evolution of thought, not even within the boundaries of the consciousness of individual heroes (with very rare exceptions). Semantic material is always given to the hero's consciousness all at once and in its entirety, and given not as individual thoughts and propositions but as the semantic orientations of whole human beings, as voices; it remains only to make a choice among them. — Mikhail Bakhtin

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up. — Amos Tversky

The connectivity of the cloud and the prevalence of tablets and smartphones have eroded the traditional online/offline divide. Within a short time we will most probably stop thinking of it as 'online.' We will simply be connected, all the time, everywhere, and the online world will be notable only by its absence when that connection breaks. — David Amerland

The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things. — Tim Berners-Lee

The very term ['mental disease'] is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space". Similarly, there can no more be a "mental illness" than there can be a "moral illness." The words "mental" and "illness" do not go together logically. Mental "illness" does not exist, and neither does mental "health." These terms indicate only approval or disapproval of some aspect of a person's mentality (thinking, emotions, or behavior). — E. Fuller Torrey

Search is the means through which we navigate the Web. If your business is not visible in search it is difficult for it to be found by your customers. Search, above all else, is marketing, and it is undergoing a massive change. — David Amerland

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your engagement in the social media environment what counts are: Comments and Sentiment. — David Amerland

There's a lot of complicated magical reasons why I'm not at the party that are too long and semantic to go into. — Alden Ehrenreich

A pair of eyes attached to a human brain can quickly make sense of the content presented on a web page and decide whether it has the answer it's looking for or not in ways that a computer can't. Until now. — David Amerland

What we learn from behavior economics is that the moment a metric is created it generates an incentive for people to pursue it. — David Amerland

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense. — Darrell Huff

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: non, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life. — Steven Pinker

Dostoevsky's authorial activity is evident in his extension of every contending point of view to its maximal force and depth, to the outside limits of plausibility. He strives to expose and develop all the semantic possibilities embedded in a given point of view (Chernyshevsky, as we have seen, strove for the same thing in his Pearl of Creation). This Dostoevsky knew how to do with extraordinary power. And this activity, the intensifying of someone else's thought, is possible only on the basis of a dialogic relationship to that other consciousness, that other point of view. We — Mikhail Bakhtin

When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: "I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all," he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose. There were no agreed standards for weights and measures. Weight and measure were themselves vague terms. Latin seemed more reliable than English, precisely because it was less worn by everyday use, but the Romans had not possessed the necessary words either. — James Gleick

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction. — Brion Gysin

A business needs a character and an identity, just like a person and just like a person it needs to have a Voice. — David Amerland

Marketing effectively, in a semantic web, revolves around those three 'little' requirements: Trust, Authority, Reputation. — David Amerland

In truth search can no more be considered independent of the Web than the Web can work without search. This symbiotic relationship brings forth all sorts of issues because it becomes part of a traditional push and pull where the Web, represented by those who actively work in it, wants to push all the wrong things, while search wants to pull in everything. — David Amerland

Don't play semantic games with the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It's a seduction. — Al Ries

From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued 'eternal verities'. We called such men 'philosophers' or 'meta-physicians'. But they seldom realized that all their 'eternal verities' consisted only of words, and words which, for the most part, belonged to a primitive language, refleting in its structure the assumed structure of the world of remote antiquity. Besides, they did not realize that these 'eternal verities' last only so long as the human nervous system is not altered. Under the influence of these 'philosophers', two-valued 'logic', and the confusion of orders of abstractions, nearly all of us contracted a firmly rooted predilection for 'general' statements - 'universals', as they were called - which in most cases inherently involved the semantic one-valued conviction of validity for all 'time' to come. — Alfred Korzybski

inheritance is a powerful tool for reducing complexity because a programmer can focus on the generic attributes of an object without worrying about the details. If a programmer must be constantly thinking about semantic differences in subclass implementations, then inheritance is increasing complexity rather than reducing it. — Steve McConnell

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle. — J.D. Salinger

A crassly arbitrary method can be avoided only when it is accepted that etymological statements are historical and not authoritative and that semantic statements must be based on the social linguistic consciousness related to usage. — James Barr

Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish. — Thomas Szasz

As the semantic engineer, your job is naming the parts and tightening nuts and bolts. I suggest you get back to your office and do that - right now! — John Sladek

The demon say's "Do you view sexual acts between individuals of the same gender to be an abomination?" ...
"Do you approve," the demon says, "of marriage between individuals of differing racial backgrounds?"
The demon continues without hesitation, asking, "Should the Zionist state of Israel be allowed to exist?"
Question after question, I'm stumped. Even fingers crossed. The paradox: Is God a racist, homophobic, anti-semantic ass? Or is God testing to see if I am? — Chuck Palahniuk

In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted. — Tim Berners-Lee

Never underestimate the ridiculous things that have been done in the name of religious-semantic obscurity. — Kate Griffin

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as"expropriating the expropriators," "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty," "they did it to me so I can do it to them," and, in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero" (1 + 1 = 0).

The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc. — Robert Anton Wilson

In Unistat, due to the strong encouragement of individualistic third-and fourth-circuit (semantic-moral) functions, slavery had grown so repugnant that it was formally "abolished" within a century after the formation of the pack constitution; it lingered on through inertia in the form of "wage slavery," which required that all primates not born into the sixty families that "owned" almost everything would have to "work" for those families or their corporations in order to get the tickets (called "money") which were necessary for survival. — Robert Anton Wilson

It's a funny semantic turn - when someone paints a landscape, no one says they "borrowed" it, only that they painted it. — Joe Bradley

Most of the books call Her a He, but I am able to ascertain what is meant, despite that semantic error.. — Roseanne Barr

It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it. — Richard Powers

Good software results from the proper organization of components, not from syntactic or semantic restrictions. Meanings — Alexander Stepanov

People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride. — Peter Watts

The great shift ... is the movement away from the value-laden languages of ... the "humanities," and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the "sciences." This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is ... especially important in psychology ... and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen. — Thomas Szasz

There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form ... According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate. — Victor Pelevin

If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning. — Ray Kurzweil

All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page. — William Gibson

It set us on a path of trying to fake them by piggybacking on supposedly semantic elements, like lipstick on a div. — Anonymous

It is not wrong to think that the traditional buying of a product has been replaced with an unwritten contract of shared values between a business and its customers. — David Amerland

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols ... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us. — Alfred Korzybski

The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

It seemed impossible that he'd chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained. — Garth Risk Hallberg

To win at semantic search you need more people than are on your payroll. — David Amerland

Falling in love. A strange phrase, so common as to be nearly useless, a kind of semantic saturation on a cultural level. It was only when you felt yourself falling in love and thought about how that felt and what it meant that the phrase took on meaning, letting you really comprehend the accuracy of the description. — Jasinda Wilder

The word "canon" is derived from a Hebrew word signifying "reed" (qaneh) and by extension "measuring stick." It enters into the Greek language as "canon" (kanon) with a wider semantic range signifying exemplary standards in relation to literary works, grammatical rules, and even certain human beings. The word was coined in the early church to indicate an absolutely authoritative, complete list of God-inspired books, which was the standard of truth (Athanasius, 39th Festal Letter). Although such a list was considered closed, it is clear that the creation of the canon did not happen in an instant. It had a long and complex history before such closure occurred. The historian Josephus (AD 95) describes a closed list of inspired books that had been authoritative for all Jews for centuries (Against Apion 8). — J. Daniel Hays

A semantic definition of a particular set of command types, then, is a rule for constructing, for any command of one of these types, a verification condition on the antecedents and consequents. — Robert W. Floyd

To demarcate [words in way that changes the meaning] is simply to speak a different language than everyone else. And I do not accept semantic games like that. [ ... ] We need to use words as they are actually used and understood. We can correct errors and inconsistencies and make distinctions. But we can't try to foist an alien language on people. — Richard Carrier

It is no accident that in the field of philosophy ontology is the study of reality, existence and coming into being. In the fields of information retrieval (semantic search) and computing, ontology is the naming of the types, interrelationships and properties of the entities that exist (in reality or conceptually) and which define a particular domain of knowledge or expertise. — David Amerland