Lexical Meaning Quotes

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

who says dog means dog?

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

I begin, then, with some remarks about 'the meaning of a word.' I think many persons now see all or part of what I shall say: but not all do, and there is a tendency to forget, or to get it slightly wrong. In so far as I am merely flogging the converted, I apologize to them.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.

I find that readers are very interested in how things are translated. I just turned in the first part of this father-son Odyssey, and there is a part when I digress and explain that the name Odysseus is related to the word for pain. Like "-odyne" in the word "anodyne," pain. It's the same, "-odyne" as in Odysseus. He's the man who both suffers endlessly, in trying to get home, but also inflicts a lot of suffering on everyone he visits.

Serrated, adj. And you said, "I'm not sure we can.