semantic distortion 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.

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

Ironically, as some people become harder, they use softer words to describe dark deeds. This, too, is part of being sedated by secularism. Needless abortion, for instance, is a "reproductive health procedure, . . ." "Illegitimacy" gives way to the wholly sanitized words "non-marital birth" or "alternative parenting."

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

Abuse of words is the foundation of ideology.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Perhaps like the many and various meanings of the word "we," liberals use the word "unsubstantiated" to mean "tested repeatedly and proved true."

Among the many evils which prevail under the sun, the abuse of words is not the least considerable. By the influence of time, and the perversion of fashion, the plainest and most unequivocal may be so altered, as to have a meaning assigned them almost diametrically opposite to their original signification.

When we don't like to face up to hard facts, we use soft words. We do not speak about killing a baby within the womb, but about "termination of potential life." Words are often multiplied to try to cover dark deeds.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

The abbreviations (e.g. NATO, UN, USSR - E.W.) denote that and only that which is institutionalized in such a way that the transcending connotation is cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.

We are used to politicians bending facts and logic to fit their aims, but the problem goes well beyond political rhetoric. Our larger discourse is dominated by cultural authorities who want us to believe things that the human mind rebels against—that there is no such thing as biological sex, that the way to fight past discrimination is with present discrimination, that not punishing crime is the way to prevent crime, that words can mean whatever they tell us they mean.

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.

All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is.

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

The abuse of terms has at all times been an evil.

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal…change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of 'change.' Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in general. It is as if opponents of the equation 2+2=7 were depicted as being against mathematics. Such a tactic might, however, be more politically effective than trying to defend the equation on its own merits.

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.

Never underestimate the role pretension plays when it comes to creating euphemistic language.

But, indeed, words are very rascals, since bonds [vows] disgraced them." Viola: "Thy reason, man?" Feste: "Troth [Truthfully], sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false, I am loathe to prove reason with them.