Semantics Quotes

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

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

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

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

In societies where coolness and being cool is a top priority, the religious replace the word 'religious' with 'spiritual' to make their faiths seem less extreme. ~ Criss Jami

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

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

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

Our agreement or disagreement is at times based on a misunderstanding. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

You speak of yourself and others who were in your same position as objects."
Boyd's eyebrows ticked up. "Isn't that what I am? I was merchandise there but now I'm back to being a tool. It's nothing but semantics. ~ Santino Hassell

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

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

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

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

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

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

They also set a pattern that has since become familiar - when trouble came, the overt, political officers of the visible government almost invariably would say they had no advance warning. The CIA in turn would say it had provided adequate warning. The public would be left to take its choice, provided it could weave its way through the maze of self-serving semantics from both sides. ~ David Wise

I paid you five thousand instead and promised the balance only if you made the match. As it turns out, this is your lucky day because I've decided to write you the full check, whether the match comes from you or from Portia. As long as I have a wife and you've been part of the process, you'll get your money." He toasted her with his beer mug. "Congratulations."

She put down her fork. "Why would you do that?"

"Because it's efficient."

"Not as efficient as having Powers handle her own introductions. You're paying her a fortune to do exactly that."

"I'd rather have you."

Her pulse kicked. "Why?"

He gave her the melty smile he must have been practicing since the cradle, one that made her feel as though she was the only woman in the world. "Because you're easier to bully. Do we have a deal or not?"

"You don't want a matchmaker. You want a lackey."

"Semantics. My hours are erratic, and my schedule changes without warning. It'll be your job to cope with all that. You'll soothe ruffled feathers when I need to cancel at the last minute. You'll keep my dates company when I'm going to be late, entertain them if I have to take a call. If things are going well, you'll disappear. If not, you'll make the woman disappear. I told you before. I work hard at my job. I don't want to have to work hard at this, too."

"Basically, you expect me to find your bride, court her, and hand her over at the al ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Identity is invariably false to facts. ~ Alfred Korzybski

Our manic accumulation of wealth,' Kuru Qan went on. 'Our headlong progress, as if motion was purpose and purpose inherently virtuous. Our lack of compassion, which we called being realistic. The extremity of our judgements, our self-righteousness - all a flight from death, Brys. All a vast denial smothered in semantics and euphemisms. Bravery and sacrifice, pathos and failure, as if life is a contest to be won or lost. As if death is the arbiter of meaning, the moment of final judgement, and above all else judgement is a thing to be delivered, not delivered unto. ~ Steven Erikson

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

I thought you were supposed to teach me, not try to kill me," I forced out through my sore throat.
"Semantics." He flicked a glance at the clock and smirked, telling me with a look exactly how much damage he could do in the next four minutes. ~ Kelly Keaton

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

Scientists and spiritualists often use different vocabularies to describe the exact same mysteries of the universe. The conflicts are frequently over semantics, not substance. - Robert Langdon ~ Dan Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a way, trying to say exactly what something is, is like trying to take a picture of the entire universe - and that has nothing to do with the non-existence of a capable camera. ~ 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

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

The difference between "boundaries we set for ourselves" and "rules we place on someone else" might just seem like one of semantics, but it is profound. Rules tend to come from the idea that it's acceptable, or even desirable, for you to control someone else's behavior, or for someone else to control yours. Boundaries derive from the idea that the only person you really control is yourself. ~ Franklin Veaux

People's goodness or badness exists within not them but our minds. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

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

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

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

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

To millions of children, a condom is nothing but a balloon. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

For me, Christianity is not a genre. It's faith. The Gospel is not a genre either. It's faith. I definitely understand the semantics of naming things to give them some kind of distinction but I think my faith is pretty distinct. If you want to call it hip hop, essentially it is. That's the art form. ~ LeCrae

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

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

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

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

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

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

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

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

let's get our semantics straight. Story does not equal fiction, much less "lies." It's the world we Christians inhabit as "people of the Book." We are story people. All ~ Sarah Arthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

meanwhile I was thinking that if half the cells in side of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate? ~ John Green

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

You cannot say something about something without revealing something about yourself. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Ambition' is 'greed' rebranded. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Ultimately, our tangled views of ambition come down to word choice. Just as many women reject the word 'feminist' but believe in opportunity and equality for all, many women reject the word 'ambition' but believe in trying to achieve difficult goals. ~ Kirsten Gillibrand

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

Children are turning themselves into monsters and, quite frankly, it is your fault. You initiated the creation of this technology, then you allowed it to slip through your fingers."

Miriam's jaw tightened. "I disagree, but now is the least optimal time imaginable for assigning blame. People are dying, and I will not stand around debating semantics with you while they are. ~ G.S. Jennsen

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

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

It wasn't every day a witch came to see him.
Darius deCompostela gave up on the paperwork he'd been trying to fill out and leaned back in his chair. Semantics. Technically, Georgia Clare hadn't come to see him. She'd come to see MacMillian. Most people did, often with barely a sideways glance in his direction. Usually, that chafed.
Not this time. For one thing, her reluctance to speak with him didn't seem to have anything to do with, well, him.
For another thing, he didn't do witches. ~ Laura Oliva

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

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

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

We indulge in semantics and slippery-slope rhetoric to excuse injustice. We read a few verse about women in a vacuum of literalism and prideful laziness. ~ Sarah Bessey

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

Overrated is order. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The thought is not the thing. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

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

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