Linguistic Ambiguity Quotes

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

An easy solution for many controversies may be found as long as we are able to be on our guard for the same words being used with conflicting meanings by different authors.

I use a lot of double meanings. I hide 'em like Easter eggs.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

I only mean forty per cent of what I say.

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.

He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictable changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as grok which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. And this had been a very short word.

Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

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

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there's a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there's more efficiency.

It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in.

Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.