every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.
History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
The dictionary contains no metaphors.
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.
Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.
It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say "that is red" instead of "that reddens," either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.
Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness.
That is [Edward Said] proposal as to how the term should be used. It surely does not describe those who are called "intellectuals" in standard usage, as he would be the first to agree.
You could figure out at least 80 percent of the context and meaning of a text if people used punctuation, and we wouldn't have had to write our sketch.
