Semantic Accuracy Quotes

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.

We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

Only the right name gives beings and things their reality. A wrong name makes everything unreal. That's what lies do.

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.

Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter. One word absent from a sentence can drastically change the true intended meaning of the entire sentence. For instance, if the word love is intentionally or accidentally replaced with hate in a sentence, its effect could trigger a war or false dogma.

It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.

Legislative language is governed by a law of etymology that is also the ancient code of the bureaucracy: It doesn't have to be right, it just has to be close enough for government work. If they understand what you mean, it doesn't matter what you say or how you say it.

Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.

Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its exact meaning.

I'm just very careful with my words when I write. Obsessively careful. I'm the sort of person who worries about the difference between "slim" and "slender."

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.