Linguistic Trickery Quotes

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.

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

Can a woodchuck chuck wood? Because the question is, "how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if," so you haven't established or proved without any shadow of a doubt that a woodchuck could chuck wood. Frankly, I believe that they chew wood. I don't think they can chuck wood at all! I take offense to the whole chucking question.

When it comes to being called a pronoun, sometimes I like to call other people 'me.' I go, like, 'Oh, these mes voted for Trump. This me is begging for change. This me is driving me to the airport.' I find that useful instead of going, like - because it's so pleasant to go 'you.'

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?

I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool Opotamus?

As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't.

I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.

Demons were like genies or philosophy professors - if you didn't word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.

English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

Heaven-as you call it-is nowhere. Let's just put some space between the w and the h in that word and you'll see that heaven is now...here.

Deep down, you see, I long to be arcane, esoteric. I would love to confound people with their own language.

The word "concluded" is a trick word. It's designed to attach authority and ontological certitude to whatever follows, when it's just another way of stating what somebody thinks.