language ambiguity Quotes

I'm losing the definition now of politics. I sort of don't know what that is anymore. People say politically correct, I don't know what that means. I know what they think they mean.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

who says dog means dog?

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.

Whatever I write in email, it doesn't mean anything. It is just words I write.

If one says “Red” (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.

Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say.

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

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

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

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.

All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way.

Did you ever spell a word so bad that your spell check has absolutely no clue what you're trying to spell? What do you end up getting, you end up getting, like, a question mark. You got a million dollars of technology just looking back at you like, 'You got me, buddy. Which is pretty amazing because I have all the words.'

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

The phrase 'I just turn on my monkey and it makes me feel good' sounds very dirty, but I can't explain why. It's great to try to use expressions like that on the comics page. People want to complain but they can't, because they can't figure out quite what they should be complaining about.

Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

The words I use Are everyday words and yet are not the same! You will find no rhymes in my verse, no magic. There are your very own phrases.

You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.