Semantic Clarity Quotes

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.

Let's not confuse the words immigrant and alien.

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

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

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

The English language has been carefully culled to find words feeble in their nature or doubtful in their meaning.

A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative.

Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.

I never say I'm an "ist" of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.

Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions.

Neither the inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalency of the fashion, shall be any excuse for those who will not take care about the meaning of their own words, and will not suffer the insignificancy of their expressions to be inquired into.

Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?

If a word means everything, then in means nothing.

The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.