#meanings

Unless followed by the world 'education', liberal has now lost this meaning [seeking knowledge or doing something for its own sake -- i.e. 'freely' with no exterior motive]. For that loss, so damanging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank those who made it the name, first of a political, and then a religious, party. The same irresponsible rapacity, the desire to appropriate a word for its 'selling-power', has often done linguistic mischief. It is not easy now to say at all in English what the word conservative would have said if it had not been 'cornered' by politicians. Evangelical, intellectual, rationalist, and temperance have been destroyed in the same way. Sometimes the arrogation is so outrageous that it fails; the Quakers have not killed the word friends. And sometimes so many different people grab at the coveted word for so many different groups or factions that, while it is spoiled for its original purpose, none of the grabbers achieve secure possession. Humanist is an example; it will probably end by being a term of eulogy as vague as gentleman. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#meanings #words #education

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#call #example #five #for example #good

People need meanings to everything. People want you to intellectualize every choice you make. ↗

— Juliana Hatfield

#every #everything #make #meanings #need

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else. ↗

— David Lynch

#because #better #different #else #know

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. ↗

— Blaise Pascal

#different #different meaning #differently #effects #meaning

Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective. ↗

— Kenneth L. Pike

#clauses #coherent #context #discourse #each

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions. ↗

— Kenneth L. Pike

#change #could #functions #human #meanings

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

#exhibits #labels #languages #meanings #museum

Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes. ↗

— John C. Ransom

#accident #also #between #discoverable #except

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation. ↗

— Bridget Riley

#belief #could #disappeared #fixed #focused