Meaning
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
![Ars Memoriae: The Theatre (1619) - Robert Fludd “In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.” --Robert Smithson](/images/thumb/200px-Theatre_from_Ars_Memoriae_by_Robert_Fludd.jpg)
Ars Memoriae: The Theatre (1619) - Robert Fludd
“In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.” --Robert Smithson
“In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.” --Robert Smithson
![The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing (c.1887) by Odilon Redon, a phrase from the Pensées (1669) by Blaise Pascal](/images/thumb/200px-The_Heart_Has_Its_Reasons_by_Odilon_Redon.jpg)
The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing (c.1887) by Odilon Redon, a phrase from the Pensées (1669) by Blaise Pascal
![The Bouba/kiki effect (1929)](/images/thumb/200px-The-bouba-kiki-effect.png)
The Bouba/kiki effect (1929)
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Meaning refers to the the symbolic value of something, its significance. In semantics it refers to the objects or concept that a word or phrase denotes, or that which a sentence says.
Meaning may also refer to:
- Meaning (linguistics), which is communicated through the use of languages
- Meaning (semiotics) has to do with the distribution of signs in sign relations
- Meaning (philosophy of language)
- Meaning (psychology)
- Meaning (existential), as it is understood in contemporary existentialism
- The meaning of life, a notion concerning the nature of human existence
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Titles
- Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1911) by Henri Bergson
- Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) by Dick Hebdige
- Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things (1991) by Stephen Bayley
Etymology
From Middle English mening, menyng, equivalent to mean + -ing. Cognate with Scots mening (“intent, purpose, sense, meaning”), West Frisian miening (“opinion, mind”), Dutch mening (“view, opinion, judgement”), German Meinung (“opinion, view, mind, idea”), Danish and Swedish mening (“meaning, sense, sentence, opinion”), Icelandic meining (“meaning”).
Citations
- 'The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things'
- "Words: Can't say what they mean don't mean what they say" --Tom Tom Club
See also
- Absurdity
- Ambiguity
- Context
- Communication
- Connotation
- Definition
- Denotation
- Dictum
- Dictionary
- Double entendre
- Hermeneutics
- Intention
- Interpretation
- Language
- Linguistics
- Logotherapy
- Man's Search for Meaning (1946) by Viktor Frankl
- Meaninglessness
- Meme
- Metaphor
- Nonsense
- Opinion
- Philosophers encroaching on the province of grammarians
- Polysemy
- Purpose
- Semantics
- Sententiae
- Significance
- Symbolism
- Thesaurus
- Trope
- Utterance
- Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, a painting by Paul Gauguin
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Meaning" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.