A Quote by William Safire

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

William Safire

Quote Topics

Becomes Certain Certain Point Mean Meaning People Point Use Word

Quote Author

William Safire
American - Author
December 17, 1929 - September 27, 2009

Words can mean different things to different people. It is important to understand what people mean when they use a certain word. Let's make an example. Take the word gay. Fifty years ago, gay meant exclusively cheerfulness, lighthearted excitement, merry or bright colors. Today this word has a different meaning. You won't call a cheerful person gay because it could be understood as something else.

Ali Sina

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Love is a special word, and I use it only when I mean it. You say the word too much and it becomes cheap.

Ray Charles

Certain people can keep a word tune, so to speak, and certain people cannot. And, above all, certain people can tell a story, and other people can't. They don't hear that point where something else has to come.

James Salter

At a certain point in your career - I mean, part of the answer is a personal answer, which is that at a certain point in your career, it becomes more satisfying to help entrepreneurs than to be one.

Marc Andreessen

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.

Lewis Carroll

I use the word totally too much. I need to change it up and use a word that is different but has the same meaning. Mitch do you like submarine sandwiches? All-encompassingly.

Mitch Hedberg

I was like, "This is a new thing that the gay people have decided? That's the gayest thing I've ever heard in my life." You can't do that. You can't decide that a word is forbidden now collectively amongst your group of human beings, that the word is a slanderous evil nasty word about homosexuals. It's not, the word doesn't mean that. And sometimes it's a good word to use in comedy. That's what your friend has to realize when he's at a bar just yelling out the word.

Joe Rogan

Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

One of the things that goes with getting older is that one becomes more conservative - and I emphasise that when I use the word conservative I do not mean politically.

Jeffrey Bernard

Whenever we remember a series of events, we remember them different. We are constantly changing. It's a flaw, but on the other hand, when we say a word, the meaning is not what you put into it. Rather, the meaning of the word is all of the past usages of that word. Like this cloud that makes up the meaning of the word. It's your subject if you write. For instance what you put in that word and what you assume it means, even its flaw. It has a general agreement.

Pipilotti Rist

We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery.

Alessandro Baricco

At a certain point the audience shouldn't worry about catching every word and understanding every twist and turn, because at a certain point that's pretty much impossible.

David Cronenberg

The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse... By misuse, I mean that people who have never glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statmeent "God is dead.