At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
William SafireRead
Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how unfinished tales linger in language, much like a lingering smile suggests a hidden story.
William Safire's quote suggests that incomplete narratives or unresolved tales persist in language similarly to the iconic smile of the Cheshire cat from 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. This lingering presence points to the idea that language carries echoes of untold stories, inviting reflection on what remains unspoken and the deeper meanings hidden within communication.
In practice
In a literary discussion about the importance of language in storytelling.
At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.
Never assume the obvious is true.
Stop worrying about the 'dumbing down' of our language by bloggers, tweeters, cableheads and MSM thumbsuckers engaged in a 'race to the bottom' of the page by little minds confined to little words.
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.
There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.
The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and... become a living language
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.
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