Quotes & Sayings About Semantics

Objections to Christianity ... are phrased in words, but that does not mean that they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defense of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper in the caverns of volition, of commitment. Perhaps this is why Saint Francis, so the story goes, instructed his followers to "preach the Gospel always, using words if necessary." It is not simply and straightforwardly wrong to make arguments in the defense of the Christian faith, but it is a relatively superficial activity: it fails to address the core issues. — Alan Jacobs

You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The continuation that obeys only obvious stack semantics, O grasshopper, is not the true continuation. — Guy Steele

Semantics are just some antics used by the enemy to get us distracted and off course from the destiny and inheritance that God hand-picked and created specifically for us... — Brandi N. Jefferson-Motley

Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?
Ford: We're safe.
Arthur: Oh good.
Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.
Arthur: Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of. — Douglas Adams

Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads. — Jerry Fodor

I heard you're campaigning on my behalf." He walked over to me. "That wouldn't be because you'd miss me too much if I were gone,would it?"
"Don't be absurd," I scoffed. "I don't condone murder, even for people like you."
"People like me,huh?" He cocked an eyebrow. "You mean devilishly handsome, debonair young men who come to sweep rebellious princesses of their feet?"
"You came to kidnap me, not sweep me off my feet," I said,but he waved his hand at the idea.
"Semantics. — Amanda Hocking

I think the semantics of mini-series for a network is that it has an end. — Cary Fukunaga

Semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense — Alfred Tarski

It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology. — David Riesman

You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. — Alfred Tarski

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70) — Jerry A. Fodor

From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of
semantics. Having no value for us except as "endness," they generate value backwards
into life. — Thomas Ligotti

Acting is fun and I refuse to get involved in the semantics and the politics of strategy and breaking out of something or doing something because you need to do something else. For me it's all about what fuels my soul and if I'm passionate about a screenplay then that's what I'll do next. — Shailene Woodley

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

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

[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves. — George Lakoff

If we're for one another, we're feminists. The rest is semantics. — Betty Buckley

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language. — Roman Jakobson

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early. — George Will

He tries not to give offense. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It's a living, he thinks; but it isn't. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that's what we're going to have. — Hilary Mantel

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

A major gap between many of the denominations stems from how people define some of the most basic terms, such as 'religion' itself. — Criss Jami

I believe it could be shown in researches - which obviously cannot be gone into here - that when a culture is in its historical phase of growing toward unity, its language reflects the unity and power; whereas when a culture is in the process of change, dispersal and disintegration, the language likewise loses its power. "When I was eighteen, Germany was eighteen," said Goethe, referring not only to the fact that the ideals of his nation were then moving toward unity and power, but that the language, which was his vehicle of power as a writer, was also in that stage. In our day the study of semantics is of considerable value, to be sure, and is to be commended. But the disturbing question is why we have to talk so much about what words mean that, once we have learned each other's language, we have little time or energy left for communicating. — Rollo May

The definition of 'Employment' by an employer, and, that by an employee, are seldom the same. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

This was about more than semantics; it represented a dangerous shift in perspective.
Rio was not at war, I pointed out; and even if it were, wars have rules. — Juliana Barbassa

What you believe you experience. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Get a degree in mechanical engineering, Hiro. Get a pilot's license, Hiro. Learn meditation and hypnosis, Hiro. Slip your roommate out of prison, Hiro. Drive thousands of clones and humans around in space, Hiro. Sit on your butt for four hundred years, Hiro.'
That's what they told me. Not once did they say, Get shot and chased and stabbed by crazed crewmates, Hiro!"
"To be fair, you were one of the people doing the chasing, crazed at the time too," Maria said.
"Semantics," he said. — Mur Lafferty

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

From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist ... is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time ... Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought? — Lucio Russo

Today's science is yesterday's magic, friend Oak. Today's magic is tomorrow's science. All disciplines are tangent and the differences between them often nothing more substantial than semantics. Scientists or laibon who dismiss conclusions out of hand because they do not countenance the methodology utilized to reach them forfeit their title. — Alan Dean Foster

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule. — John Rogers Searle

If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes. — Alfred Tarski

According to conceptual semantics, the meanings of words and sentences are formulas in an abstract language of thought. According to Linguistic Determinism, the language we speak is the language of thought, or at least structures it in major ways. Let me say at the outset that language surely affects thought-at the very least, if one person's words didn't affect another person's thoughts, language as a whole would be useless. The question is whether language determines thought-whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways. — Steven Pinker

We depend on various cultural forms-the syntax and semantics of English, the deliverances of modern astronomy-to know that the earth is round, but this in no way jeopardizes the objective circularity of the planet. — Douglas Groothuis

The discipline of AutoQuotery is based on generating axiomatic entries that technically provide a mechanism to serve later on as a network of neural synapses between the very same lexemes it is utilizing. However, those lexical atomic units are signed differently -by the AutoQuoter- from their usages in the dictionary and therefore behave semantically in a wave-like pattern and syntactically in a particle-like pattern within the boundaries of the produced Quotery Lexicon itself. As time passes by, the semantics attain a standing-waves state mimicking thereby the dictionary; and almost ends up putting the synapses in an idle state when no more signals are being transferred between the lexemes. Philosophy would insist that an idle state cannot be reached, while Reason would emphasize -as a response- that such a perception is only pedagogically sensed when engaging (by studying, practicing or teaching) in the AutoQuotery discipline. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

If you want to understand the nature of something, to find out the truth, that is one thing. If you want to play semantics, make up wild thought 'experiments', that is another thing. I am not so interested in the latter, though I do appreciate that it can be fun, however unproductive. — Patricia Churchland

In order to understand what happened, we'll use words in the way that they exist: as drawers of distinction between ideas. — John Hadac

I have no interest in anything so frivolous as the bona fide religion or mankind's pathetic debate over whose version of the church is correct. Circular arguments over the semantics of faith hold no interest for me. Those are questions answered only through death! — M.ralte

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

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I think back to my dream of the boy, because in it I find solace. I like that word. I'm going to make it my word of the year. There is just something about that boy that makes me feel like I belong. Belong. Long to be. Weird word, but semantics aside, it is up there with solace. — Melina Marchetta

The thought is not the thing. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

There are only two things in the world: nothing and semantics. — Werner Erhard

The pervert."
"He prefers to think of himself as sexual deviant."
"Semantics. — Ilona Andrews

There is something very curious in semantics, that the word 'meaning' is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find. What does 'to mean' mean? — Anonymous

It is a sign of intellectual maturity to always crawl to conclusions. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics. — Tom Stoppard

He who says that someone isn't himself is a victim of statistics. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A universe of classical particles is devoid of knowledge because the universe can only be itself and not a representation of something else. If the universe was only composed of classical particles, then there would only be physical properties but no meanings. The idea that we can have information about an object without becoming that object is central to all knowledge. — Ashish Dalela

All forms of oppression carry their own semantics. — Judd Trichter

Looking at what 'foreplay' is, 'sexual intercourse' is a game. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with nature/ Spirit/God/dess/Choose-your-own-semantics, freely, and free of any mediator. But most importantly: they make things happen. The best definition of magic I've been able to come up with is "symbolic action with intent" - "action" being the operative word. Witches are midwives to metamorphosis. They are magical women, and they, quite literally, change the world. — Pamela J. Grossman

Psychology, the talking cure, linguistics, and semantics - they're all like dogs poking around and sniffing their own vomit. There might be some gems in there, you never know. For certain you will at the very least know what you had for lunch. And you can ascertain what not to eat again. — David Byrne

There's never been a better time to change the way you think. Replace every 'I can't' with 'How can I?' It might sound like semantics, but I promise it will bring whatever you want to accomplish much closer to becoming a reality. — Maynard Webb

I think that lesson was the most important: that none of us actually grow up. We get bigger, and older, but put of us always retains that small rabbit heart, trembling furiously, secretively, with wonder and fear. There's no irony in it. No semantics or subtext. Only red blood and green grass and silver stars — Leah Raeder

If he'd had to judge based on the two of them, then ExtraOrdinaries were damaged, to say the least. But these words people threw around
humans, monsters, heroes, villains
to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics. — Victoria Schwab

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the language. — John Backus

She was playing with semantics. I felt certain that she understood the word "tip" in English. She enjoyed pretending that she thought I wanted the Duchess to be upside down with her face buried in the sewage of some manhole while her beautifully shod feet waved desperate high-heels in the air. — Caroline Blackwood

For the individual, as I can testify, a brief grounding in semantics, besides making philosophy unreadable, makes unreadable most political speeches, classical economic theory, after-dinner oratory, diplomatic notes, newspaper editorials, treatises on pedagogics and education, expert financial comment, dissertations on money and credit, accounts of debates, and Great Thoughts from Great Thinkers in general. You would be surprised at the amount of time this saves. — Stuart Chase

Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning. — Cormac McCarthy

Sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Where are we?" Nick shouted.
"I don't know, you're the nautical one. I just piloted the boat out of the harbor."
"Pirated! You pirated it out of the harbor!"
"Semantics. — Abigail Roux

The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules. — Fernando J. Corbato

Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty — Charles Stross

So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the
ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by
disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles. — R. Buckminster Fuller

When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics. — Len Wein

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism. — Russ Shafer-Landau

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer. — Joseph Brodsky

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted. — H.R. Haldeman

A theory of reality must not only explain reality, but also knowledge about that reality because knowing reality is part of reality. — Ashish Dalela

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches. — Malcolm-Jamal Warner

What luck! If the theories of Epictetus, Karen Horney (who first talked about the "tyranny of the shoulds"), Alfred Korzybski (the founder of general semantics), and REBT are correct, you almost always bring on your emotional problems by rigidly adopting one of the basic methods of crooked thinking - musturbation. Therefore, if you understand how you upset yourself by slipping into irrational shoulds, oughts, demands, and commands, unconsciously sneaking them into your thinking, you can just about always stop disturbing yourself about anything. — Albert Ellis

I like to believe prayers aren't tethered to semantics. — P.C. Cast

Go home, Butch. I'm not going to do anything stupid." [Vishous to Butch]
"Stupider, you mean."
"Semantics are for shit. — J.R. Ward

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious-that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment. — Dan Brown

If we expect translation to reproduce the totality of the semantics and affective uses of the original text, then we believe that translation must be loyal to the seminal language system, rather than letting the discourse travel and undertake the adventure of discovering - or creating - a new set of meaning according to the politics of the translation itself. Rigid loyalty to the original in the translated version was, in effect, the intentionality of the translation of the doctrines and precepts that constituted the colonial discourse. — Hector Dominguez Ruvalcaba

Where are we? What happened?" Syn pursed his lips. "Which question would you prefer I answer first?" "You pick." "Where ... I commandeered a fighter." "You mean you stole it?" "Semantics, semantics."
- Shahara & Syn — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations. — Antonio Gramsci

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born
the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. — Aldous Huxley

Faeces by any other name would smell as gross — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Moving in the conventional direction, phonetics concerns the acoustic dimensions of linguistic sound. Phonology studies the clustering of those acoustic properties into significant cues. Morphology studies the clustering of those cues into meaningful units. Syntax studies the arrangement of those meaningful units into expressive sequences. Semantics studies the composite meaning of those sequences. — Randy Allen Harris

There's a pattern here. In summing up the language of matter, space, and time, I concluded that they are measured by human goals, not just by a scale, a clock, and a tape measure. Now we see that the fourth major category in conceptual semantics, causality, also cares about our intentions and interests. — Steven Pinker

If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68) — Jerry A. Fodor

Is another universe bigger or smaller than the idea of God? Does it matter? If there is a sphere where 'angels' dwell, is it a matter of semantics whether we choose to call it Heaven? — Laini Taylor

If you're reading this book, you're probably already interested in being green, and almost certainly already a parent (or about to become one), so I won't trouble too much with the semantics of what 'being green' means, but just say that doing the 'green' thing here means being as environmentally friendly as possible, while considering your child's everyday personal health as well, and taking into account social-justice issues to some degree, because no-one is an island and humans and animals are part of the environment too. Even if you're new to this, it's entirely
possible, with a little helping hand, to form new, green lifestyle habits, so long as you're prepared to take baby steps to begin with (and pardon the pun). — Zion Lights

The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs [ ... ] and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel. — Robert W. Floyd

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? — Frank R. Wilson

Ambition' is 'greed' rebranded. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Suppose 'Heaven' and 'Hell' are just other universes."
"Just other universes," Eliza repeated, smiling. "And the Big Bang was just an explosion."
Dr. Chaudhary chuckled. "Is another universe bigger or smaller than the idea of God? Does it matter? If there is a sphere where 'angels' dwell, is it a matter of semantics, whether we choose to call it Heaven?"
"No," Eliza replied, swiftly and firmly, a bit to her own surprise. "It isn't a matter of semantics. It's a matter of motive."
"I beg your pardon?" Dr. Chaudhary gave her a quizzical look. Something in Eliza's tone had hardened.
"What do they want?" she asked. "I think that's the bigger question. They came from somewhere." There is another universe. "And if that somewhere has nothing to do with 'God' " - It doesn't. - "then they're acting on their own behalf. And that's scary. — Laini Taylor

Nobody wants to say that the man [Obama] is a Marxist. Okay, so he's not a Marxist. He's a progressive! This is semantics. — Glenn Beck

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world. — Steven Pinker

There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black - in itself. — 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.

I guess it's not the plan that counts, but the words in which the plan is wrapped. Semantics count for everything, and it's obvious that the resolute Republicans are better at semantics than the weak, flip-flopping Democrats. — Bruce Barnbaum

The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over. — Hakim Bey

Semantics, Admiral. I'd appreciate an honest answer."

"I'd appreciate a multitude of honest answers, but I rarely expect to receive them." Miriam sighed; the verbal tete-a-tete was growing tiresome. Time to bring an end to it with, ironically, honesty. — G.S. Jennsen

ANTI-ZIONISTS, last of all, exhibit a distaste for certain words. It was Thomas Hobbes who, anticipating semantics, pointed out that words are counters, not coins; that the wise man looks through them to reality. This counsel many anti-Zionists seem to have neglected. They are especially disturbed by the two nouns nationalism and commonwealth, and by the adjective political. And yet these terms on examination are not at all upsetting. — Milton Steinberg