# antisemantic
## English
### Etymology

From anti- +‎ semantic.

### Adjective

antisemantic (not comparable)
* Based on form or structure rather than meaning.
** 1957, Reuel Denney, The Astonished Muse, page 181:As Albert says to Pogo during the poetry contest: "I made it up. I made it rhyme. Now I gotta make it mean something?" While Albert is almost self-consciously taking a Dadaist artistic position during this interchange, it is also true that his antisemantic tendencies are constantly with him.
** 1971, Ferenc Kovacs, Linguistic Structures and Linguistic Laws, page 55:To point up Antal's anti-meaning attitude I could still continue recalling quotations: a single one must yet be added here, and this from his work where he tried to outline the distinction between word-declension and word-formation, describing the Hungarian case-system in a strictly antisemantic manner.
** 1995, Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars:But meaning was definitely out of the main purview of linguistics in that period, following Bloomfield's warning that it has the potential to lead to chaos. So, for instance, Hill uses and obscure paper by Joos ("Towards a First Theorem in Semantics") to serve "as one refutation (among many) to the oft-repeated but erroneous charge that American linguistics of the 1940's and 1950's was anti-semantic and materialist, characteristics which it supposedly owed to Leonard Bloomfield,” but interpolated into Hill's paper is a lamentation by Joos that the audience “reacted almost entirely negatively” (Hill, 1991:30).
** 2014, Josef Vachek, Selected Writings in English and General Linguistics, page 69:The most striking feature of the distributionalist approach to language is, however, its antisemantic bias, typical especially of Harris but going back to scholars like B. Bloch, G. L. Trager, and ultimately L. Bloomfield.
* Devoid of meaning.
** 2012, B.M. Taylor, Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy, page 96:Clearly, if the conjunction of realism and antisemantic-realism had the consequence that truth is an accident, that would be a serious problem.
** 2014, Eric Dietrich, Thinking Computers and Virtual Persons, page xi:The antisemantic arguments tap into deeply held intuitions that computers are just not the sorts of things one can correctly view as cognitive agents, as persons.
** 2023, Peter Turchi, (Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before, page 107:Later, when William suggests that “the desire for children is hardwired,” Otto goes off on another antisemantic rant: “Hardwired.” You know, that's a term I've really come to loathe! It explains nothing, it justifies anything; you might as well say, "Humans have children because the Great Moth in the Sky wants them to." Or "Humans have children because humans have children." Hardwired," please! It's lazy, it's specious, it's perfunctory, and it's utterly without depth.
* Hostile to meaning and clear communication; tending to conceal or undermine sense.
** 2005, Peter Nicholls, “The poetics of opacity: readability and literary form”, in Janet Harbord, Jan Campbell, editors, Psycho-Politics And Cultural Desires, page 151:The event is repressed at the level of direct expression and can only make itself felt again in what Abraham and Torok call the “antisemantic” features of language.
** 2022, Stephen Clingman, “Trump the Antisemantic, and the Boundaries of Populism”, in Merle A. Williams, editor, Cultures of Populism: Institutions, Practices and Resistance:In this chapter, I consider Donald Trump as an 'antisemantic' president and link antisemanticism to broader forms of populism.
** 2022, Xun Lin, Dead Writers Club, The Monopoly On Violence:Hitler always used the term "Socialist" to describe himself and his dogma, and he did not refer to hemself as a "Nazi," nor as a "Fascist," nor did he use the term "Third Reich." Those latter terms are used today by antisemantic socialists to shroud what Hitler and his admirers called themselves: SOCIALISTS.
* Misconstruction of antisemitic
** 1953, Philadelphia (Pa.). Commission on Human Relations, Report - Volumes 2-7, page 37:After the pastor's death, however, the complainant reported that antisemantic publications were again being sold.
** 2010, Mary Christina Love, Walking the Plank: To a Dhimmi Nation:In 2006, the Department of Homeland Security gaveout small amounts of grant money to synagogues and Jewish schools after they received threats from Muslims. A number of mosques, whose anti-semantic and anti-capitalist agenda generates fearful and defensive reactions, then began to help themselves to some of the available grant money.
** 2014, Francis Chishala ·, A Robust Think Tank for Africa:Adolf Hilter had great persuasive power that he managed to convince his listeners with anti-semantic views and the rest is history.
** 2015, John Addicks, Revelation: A Book Of Symbols Made Easy:Satan is Antichrist and anti-semantic. Satan hates Jesus, and he hates the Jews!