Arguing Semantics Quotes

I sit in the center row of the SUV, fuming on the way back to the hotel. “Can I offer you a bit of advice, Prince Nicholas?” Tommy asks. I may have been mumbling out loud. “Shut up, Tommy,” Logan says from the driver’s seat... “It’s all right.” I meet Tommy’s light brown eyes in the rearview mirror, where he sits behind me. “Offer away.” He scratches his head. “I think the lass was embarrassed.” “Embarrassed?” “Aye. It’s like my younger sister, Janey. She’s a good-looking girl, but one day she had a zit on her forehead that was so big it made her look like a dickicorn. And she was walking—” James, in the front passenger seat, reads my mind. “What the fuck is a dickicorn?” “It’s an expression,” Tommy explains. James angles around to look at Tommy, his blue eyes crinkled. “An expression for what?” “For…someone with something big coming out o’ their forehead that looks like a cock.” “Wouldn’t it be a unicock, then?” James wonders. “For Christ’s sake,” Logan cuts in. “Would you forget about the fuckin’ unicorn or dickicock or whatever the hell it is—” “It doesn’t make any sense!” James argues. “—and let Tommy finish his story? We’re never gonna hear the end at this rate.” James throws up his hands, grumbling. “Fine. But it still doesn’t make any sense.” For the record, my semantic vote goes to unidick

That the present tense marker in English can mark time frames other than the immediate present has led many grammarians, including Quirk et al. (1985), to argue that semantically English does not have a present tense per se but rather a past tense and a non-past tense.

The statist Left’s first move was to alter the meaning of liberalism so as to keep the free Left and the public in a constant state of confusion. They diluted the original principles of liberalism while firing cheap polemical shots, arguing that John Locke’s liberalism had nothing to offer, that it contradicted itself. After all, if the statist Left could not win a fair fight on the philosophical battlefield, it had to resort to chicanery to gain an advantage. One way to accomplish this was to adulterate or falsify the liberal message to render it meaningless while advancing a new, redefined liberalism to replace the old. The deception was successful. The free-Left liberals and their allies had lost the semantic ammunition to defend liberty, and therefore became neutered, defanged, almost defenseless, deprived of the cognitive capability to defend the autonomy of the individual. As for the statist Left, they had to work diligently to ‘defascistize’ historical Fascism, because to do otherwise would force them to face an ugly image in the mirror.

Amazing.” Anders glanced around with a start. He found Lucian leaning against the door frame, eyeing him with amusement. “What?” he asked, sitting up straight. “How everything can change so swiftly,” Lucian said dryly, moving into the kitchen. Anders watched him get a glass out of the cupboard before asking mildly, “And what is it you think is changing?” “Three days ago when you first realized you couldn’t read her and that she might possibly be your life mate, you weren’t happy,” Lucian said. He filled the glass with water, took a drink, and then continued, “You didn’t like the idea of anyone stealing so much of your attention, of having something to lose, of becoming a mother hen like me, or of being led around by your dick. Now you want to follow that presently very evident dick upstairs and claim Valerie by any means necessary.” Anders glanced down to note that not only did he still have an erection, but it was very evident in his boxers. Grabbing one of the couch pillows, he dragged it over his lap and muttered, “You caught all that from reading my thoughts, did you?” “Clear as glass,” Lucian said. “Right.” Anders said and grimaced at the knowledge that Lucian had read his less than complimentary thoughts about his worry for Leigh and being led around by his dick. Raising an eyebrow, he asked, “Do I owe you an apology?” “Nope. I can hardly complain when I was eavesdropping on your thoughts.” He took another drink of his water. As Lucian lowered the glass, he swallowed, and added, “But I’d go softly with Valerie. I wouldn’t want you to rush things and blow it.” “Thanks for the advice,” Anders said dryly. “I’m serious,” Lucian said softly. Anders stilled. As a rule, Lucian could be counted on to growl, grunt, or bark. His voice only got that soft, solemn sound on very rare occasions. When it did, you were smart to listen. Anders nodded. “I’m listening.” “She just experienced a nightmarish two weeks at the hands of what she thinks is a vampire. One of our kind,” he pointed out. “Ten days and nights in the flesh and three in fever-driven nightmares.” “But we aren’t vampires,” Anders pointed out. “We’re immortals.” “Semantics,” Lucian said with a shrug. “It won’t make any difference to her whether we are the mythological cursed and soulless beast Stoker wrote about, or scientifically evolved mortals turned nearly immortal by bio-engineered nanos that were introduced into our blood before the fall of Atlantis.” “Scientifically evolved mortals who need more blood than the human body can produce to power those nanos,” Anders added wearily. Lucian nodded. “We have fangs, we don’t age, we are hard to kill and we need blood to survive. To her and many others, we are vampires.” “We drink bagged blood to survive now,” Anders argued. “The immortal who kidnapped and held Valerie and the other women is a rogue.” “True,” Lucian agreed. “Unfortunately, Valerie’s first encounter with our kind was via that rogue. She, understandably, is not going to be very receptive to the possibility that there are good guys among our kind. She needs to get to know and trust us, you especially, before you reveal too much.” Anders nodded, seeing the wisdom in what he said. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “By don’t reveal too much, you aren’t including—” “No,” Lucian said, rare amusement curving his lips. “Bed her all you want, just keep your mouth shut while you do. At least until you think she can handle it. Otherwise,” he warned, “you could lose the chance of a lifetime.

You’re carrying my child. That makes us family…whether you like it or not, Shorty.” His voice is gentle, but the force behind it brooks no argument. “We don’t know if I’m pregnant.” “Let’s think positive. And you need to lie down. Doctor’s orders.” “There’s no real data supporting––” “The doctor said you should lie down,” he says, talking over me. “You wanna do somethin’ to jeopardize this baby?” Sigh. I’m not going to argue over semantics. One of the things I’ve learned to appreciate about him is the transparency of his thoughts. I seldom have to guess what Dane is thinking or feeling because his face tells me. And right now I can tell by the look on his face he’s ready to argue to his last breath over this. “Fine…but I don’t like to eat in bed.” He replies with a smug grin. No surprise. Leading Dane to my bedroom feels weird, weirdly intimate. I pause at the threshold. He takes one look at the bed I speak of and gasps, eyebrows high up his forehead. “A California king?” Everybody’s got a fetish. Mine is oversized luxury mattresses. No doubt this stems from the lumpy twin I grew up sleeping in. A shrink would have a field day with this, among other things, which is why I’ve never seen one. “I like big beds,” I mutter, as I lie down, propped up by a stuffed headboard and a mountain of pillows piled up behind me. “Marry me?” “No.” “Glad we got that out of the way. Hand me the remote.” Placing his dish down on the side table, he gets into bed, legs spread apart to accommodate the size of his ego. Once he’s made himself comfortable, he grabs his dish and starts eating. “You have two choices,” I tell him. “Housewives of Atlanta, or the Food Network?” He stops chewing his pasta to give me a dirty look. “Housewives it is.

That Jews aren’t really a race is an argument beloved by racists and anti-Semites alike, but a rarer, adjacent truth is that Judaism isn’t really a religion. You might think it’s semantics but I’d argue it’s mechanics. Look under the bonnet of most major religions and you’ll find a system of beliefs that’s at least internally consistent (the clue’s in the name: they’re faiths). But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt.

Denying Cross-linguistic Influence, Communicative Approaches seem to surmise that, as in L1 acquisition, L2 word-formation morphemes possessing Semantic Transparency and Productivity will be acquired early by pre intermediate L2 learners, and even may be the sole morpheme pre intermediate L2 learners acquire; which, as we shall demonstrate, is not necessarily the case for pre intermediate L2 learners. A second assumption we deduce from Communicative Approaches is that, as in L1 acquisition, L2 learners will show a similar sensitivity for L2 productive word-formation rules and patterns (e. g. noun-noun compounds, compounding in general etc.) with that of English children acquiring their L1; which, as we shall argue below, is not in all occasions true for pre intermediate L2 learners.

Knowledge of Lexical Semantic Relationship: represents children’s ability in recognizing that two words share a common word base.In other words, it symbolizes children’s ability in recognizing the semantic relationship that words belonging to a word family share (e. g. argue, argument). The result of our tests seem to argue that there is no difference in the Knowledge of Lexical Semantic Relationship both English and Albanian pupils possess

We argue that, in addition to affixes’ knowledge, knowledge of the root word is a perquisite in the acquisition of Knowledge of Lexical Semantic Relationship. Schmitt and Meara (1997, 28) also revealed that pre intermediate L2 learners possess higher word association capability for root words they were aware of. Elementary books should be rich in root words.

Another aspect noticed in L1 acquisition is the low acquisition of multi- morphemic words (i. e., complex words composed of three or more morphemes) by preschool age English children. Preschool age English children acquire solely 0.5 multi-morphemic words per day and multi-morphemic words constitute 8% of the vocabulary first grade English children own (Anglin, 1993, 71-79). First to third grade English children acquire 2 multi-morphemic words per day. Multi-morphemic words constitute 12 % of the third grade English children’s vocabulary. Fourth to fifth grade English children acquire 7.1 multi-morphemic words per day and multi-morphemic words constitute 19% of the fifth grade English children’s vocabulary (1993, 71-79). The low acquisition rate of multi-morphemic words by preschool age English children can be explained in terms of lack of parsability of multi-morphemic words. In his ‘Complexity-Based Ordering’ Model, Hay (2000, 2002) upholds that Level 1 suffixes (usually being Non-neutral suffixes), which occur inside other suffixes, are not parsed out during the processing of a multi-suffixed word by native speakers. Level 2 suffixes (usually being Neutral suffixes), which occur outside another suffix, are parsed out during the processing of multi-suffixes words. Level 1 suffixes: -al, -an, -ant, -ance, -ary, -ate, -ic, -ify, -ion, -ity, -ive, -ory, -ous, -y, -ity, -ation. Level 1 prefixes: sub-, de-, in-. Level 2 suffixes: -able, -age, -en, -er, -ful, -hood, -ish, -ism, -ist, -ize, -ly, -ment, -ness. (Fab, 1988, 531). Level 2 prefixes: re-, un-, non-. Obviously, such lack of parsability obscures the semantic transparency of multi-morphemic words and impedes the analytical acquisition of multi-morphemic words by preschool age English children. A strenuous effort to acquire multi-morphemic words would result in acquisition of such words as a unit (as the Lexeme-Based Model suggests, see Aronoff, 1994), rather than analytically (as argued by Morpheme-Based Model). Such lack of parsability also obscures the semantic transparency of multi-morphemic words and impedes the analytical acquisition of multi-morphemic words by pre intermediate L2 learners. The degree of Morphological Translation Equivalence that L2 multi-morphemic words share with their counterparts in pupils’ L1 is also lower compared to bi-morphemic words. Consequently, multi-morphemic words will be acquired as a unit rather than analytically by pre intermediate L2 learners. Elementary books designed for pre intermediate L2 learners - in addition to the insertion of root words - should also comprise less multi-morphemic words; perhaps solely or less than 8% of their vocabulary.

... there was no point in trying to argue semantics about subtle bigotry with a straight white guy.

The findings that were deemed believable enough to be published, however, revolutionized ethologists’ thinking. Ethologists began to speak less often of a chasm between man and ape; they began to speak instead of a dividing “line.” And it was a line that, in the words of Harvard primatologist Irven De Vore, was “a good deal less clear than one would ever have expected.” What makes up this line between us and our fellow primates? No longer can it be claimed to be tool use. Is it the ability to reason? Wolfgang Kohler once tested captive chimps’ reasoning ability by placing several boxes and a stick in an enclosure and hanging a banana from the high ceiling by a string. The animals quickly figured out that they could get to the banana by stacking the boxes one atop the other and then reaching to swat at the banana with a stick. (Once Geza Teleki found himself in exactly this position at Gombe. He had followed the chimpanzees down into a valley and around noon discovered he had forgotten to bring his lunch. The chimps were feeding on fruit in the trees at the time, and he decided to try to knock some fruit from nearby vines with a stick. For about ten minutes he leaped and swatted with his stick but didn’t manage to knock down any fruit. Finally an adolescent male named Sniff collected a handful of fruit, came down the tree, and dropped the fruit into Geza’s hands.) Some say language is the line that separates man from ape. But this, too, is being questioned. Captive chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught not only to comprehend, but also to produce language. They have been taught American Sign Language (ASL), the language of the deaf, as well as languages that use plastic chips in place of words and computer languages. One signing chimp, Washoe, often combined known signs in novel and creative ways: she had not been taught the word for swan, but upon seeing one, she signed “water-bird.” Another signing chimp, Lucy, seeing and tasting a watermelon for the first time, called it a “candy-drink”; the acidic radish she named “hurt-cry-food.” Lucy would play with toys and sign to them, much as human children talk to their dolls. Koko, the gorilla protegee of Penny Patterson, used sign language to make jokes, escape blame, describe her surroundings, tell stories, even tell lies. One of Biruté’s ex-captives, a female orangutan named Princess, was taught a number of ASL signs by Gary Shapiro. Princess used only the signs she knew would bring her food; because she was not a captive, she could not be coerced into using sign language to any ends other than those she found personally useful. Today dolphins, sea lions, harbor seals, and even pigeons are being taught artificial languages, complete with a primitive grammar or syntax. An African grey parrot named Alex mastered the correct use of more than one hundred spoken English words, using them in proper order to answer questions, make requests, do math, and offer friends and visitors spontaneous, meaningful comments until his untimely death at age 31 in 2007. One leading researcher, Ronald Schusterman, is convinced that “the components for language are present probably in all vertebrates, certainly in mammals and birds.” Arguing over semantics and syntax, psychologists and ethologists and linguists are still debating the definitions of the line. Louis Leakey remarked about Jane’s discovery of chimps’ use of tools that we must “change the definition of man, the definition of tool, or accept chimps as man.” Now some linguists have actually proposed, in the face of the ape language experiments, changing the definition of language to exclude the apes from a domain we had considered uniquely ours. The line separating man from the apes may well be defined less by human measurement than by the limits of Western imagination. It may be less like a boundary between land and water and more like the lines we draw on maps separating the domains of nations.

The philosopher has a duty,... in reading scientific texts, to combine semantic tolerance with semantic criticism—to accept in practice what he denounces as a matter of principle, namely, the confusions that result from illegitimately converting correlations into identifications.

That good, huh? It’s free, Oberon. Rather than argue the semantics of great with him, I laughed inwardly and enjoyed my own plate of bacon and bread.

it is not necessary to convince anyone of anything..... and the words do not matter much. it is the knowledge and experience that is transcendent.