I have spent every New Year's Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It's a place with meaning for me.
Friable isn't often used of food, yet its meaning lends itself perfectly to pastry and crumbly biscuits.
Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually, the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia - meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.
In tournaments, players typically raise when they enter the pot. In cash games, though, players are more likely to limp in before the flop. That's because cash games are usually deeper-stacked, meaning that players will have a higher ratio of chips in relation to the blinds than they would in a tournament.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.
Why should Iran have a deterrent strategy? Well, it's surrounded by hostile enemies. Both of its borders have been under occupation by a hostile superpower, the United States, which is constantly violating the U.N. charter by leaving open what they call the saying, 'all options are open' - meaning the threat of war.
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but the bravest book publishers to publish.
In retrospect, the populist panic may have been overblown. Regarding Brexit, for example, the shock exaggerated its meaning. Because it was so unexpected, it became a sensation.
A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist's role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.
When I take a risk, I like it to be a calculated risk, meaning I make it as small as possible.
Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.
Satellite communications connect television screens in Japan with television cameras in England, and the distance of half a world loses its meaning.
You don't need to raise taxes on rich people, because they create capitalization and investment. But you need to tax speculation - meaning capital gains.
The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.
The Parc des Volcans in Rwanda, where I conduct most of my studies, is heavily infested with poachers and herdsmen, whose cattle graze right through my camp area. Park boundaries have no meaning to these tribesmen.
Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected.
Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I'm riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I'm riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park - no, I don't wear the dreaded helmet then.
I wasn't all that familiar with the 'Texas Chainsaw' franchise, and I knew who Leatherface was, but I had never seen any of the films, so I didn't know what the meaning behind it was.
