ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from April 2008

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from April 2008

In this issue.
April 1, 2008... KORZYBSKI WROTE IN SCIENCE & SANITY that "without the consciousness of abstracting, we all become nearly helpless and hopeless semantic victims of a primitive-made language and its underlying structural metaphysics." On our cover this issue we...

From the Executive Director.
April 1, 2008... I CONSIDER IT AN HONOR and a privilege to have been appointed as the new Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics, and I want to thank the IGS Board of Trustees for the trust that they have placed in me. The Institute, and the...

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: the conflict between word & image.(55th Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture)
April 1, 2008... A CHILD LEARNS a novel bit of information. A set of neurons fires in his or her brain. With each reinforcement of the lesson, the same neurons fire again. The surrounding neurons, sensitized to the discharges of the first set, also begin to...

From 2001: A Space Odyssey.(Time-Binding Tales The First Steps)(Excerpt)
April 1, 2008... A NEW ANIMAL was abroad on the planet, spreading slowly out from the African heartland. It was still so rare that a hasty census might have overlooked it, among the teeming billions of creatures roving over land and sea. There was no evidence,...

Arthur C. Clarke: abstractions.(Information Age)
April 1, 2008... I WOULD DEFEND THE LIBERTY of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent. The dinosaurs disappeared...

I remember being born.(earliest memory)
April 1, 2008... I REMEMBER BEING BORN! "Nonsense" you say? Well I've certainly heard that most of my life. Nonetheless there's little doubt any more that I do remember an experience of birth. I was all of sixty years old before this was verified as a true...

An account, Korzybski old chap, of this thing of ours.(POETRY RING)
April 1, 2008... WENDELL JOHNSON SAID that "the better part of science is the language of science," and like science, poetry has a language all its own. We therefore might consider the corresponding claim, that the better part of poetry is the language of...

Shark value.(POETRY RING)(Poem)
April 1, 2008... Here's another one about love, loss and lust. You want to read it and you know you must - I can be funny and I've gained your trust and it gets so lonely in the dark. Of which humiliation do you wish to hear? Maybe...

Silent resonance.(POETRY RING)(Poem)
April 1, 2008... Early spring; the water is cold. You place your hands upon it, palms open; flat, as if to float upon the surface of life. This sea; your life; my life... all the space between, invisible; an infinite expansion; ...

Why Johnny has difficulty making his point: general semantics, critical thinking, and student writing.(Report)
April 1, 2008... MOST WHO READ this publication probably either know from experience or have heard through the semantic grapevine that we can develop more precision in our evaluations if we apply the principles of general semantics. And many of us who teach...

Examining five "over/under-defined" terms used in American political discourse.
April 1, 2008... GENERAL SEMANTICS VIEWS Most terms as over/under defined: "They are over-defined (over-limited) by intension, or verbal definition, because of our belief in the definition; and are hopelessly under-defined by extension or facts...." (1)...

How pseudo-scientists get away with it.(Essay)
April 1, 2008... EACH MONTH more people read astrological journals than read Harper's, The Saturday Review, ETC., and Science combined. Millions of Americans, including many university graduates, guide their affairs at least in part by the position of the...

Self.(Poem)
April 1, 2008... WITH WHOM DO YOU SPEAK when you talk to yourself? A spirit? An angel? Some wry little elf? A watcher? A pilot? Some brain-dwelling troll? A Zeitgeist? A psyche? Someone in control? A tiny dictator who rules from inside? Some psychic...

When is a wall not a wall?("Don't say 'is.' Do something!")(Short story)
April 1, 2008... HIS AWARENESS OF PAIN AND DARKNESS drifted in and out. The GS Detective lay on his back. He opened his eyes. He couldn't see. He closed his eyes. He was lying on something hard and cold. Where was he? His head hurt so much, it hardly...

Arts reporting and the gradation of abstraction.(Essay)
April 1, 2008... S.I. HAYAKAWA'S DISCUSSION of how people use and react to words in Language in Thought and Action can be applied to explain why classical music journalism has a small readership. Often, the words in these articles describing the fine arts are...

Mapping instruction with media.
April 1, 2008... GENERAL SEMANTICIST J. SAMUEL BOIS (1978, 6) stated that "[a] revolution is a radical and irreversible change in a fundamental element in our way of life." He describes the technical developments which are occurring today as a revolution making...

Do words have inherent meaning?(Report)
April 1, 2008... IN AUGUST 2007, PARTICIPANTS on the Institute of General Semantics Forum discussed the frequently quoted statement "words don't mean, people mean," and the question of whether or not words have inherent meaning in a thread that shares its title...

Misunderstanding media: a blurry "Vision of Students Today" (part one).
April 1, 2008... THE IMAGERY IN A RECENT and very popular YouTube broadcast "A Vision of Students Today" exposes students in a college lecture hall seemingly living in a state of "all-at-oneness" with their media. Repetitive New Age marching music provides the...

Misunderstanding media: a blurry "Vision of Students Today" (part two).
April 1, 2008... Faces blank and joyless, rows of university students sit in a large white lecture hall and hold up messages on notepaper or laptop screens; these remarks bemoan the impersonality, expense, and disconnectedness of their academics. Sterility and...

Global warming as a metaphor.(METAPHORS IN ACTION)
April 1, 2008... I FIRST HEARD THE TERM ''global warming" in the late 1970s. I heard it during some talks by nuclear scientists from Los Alamos, New Mexico. They claimed that the earth was warming up, and it would be good to build more nuclear power plants...

Al Gore. The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin, 2007.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Al Gore, like Neil Postman, contends that the republic of letters (print media) has been invaded and occupied by the republic of television and the result has been a dumbing down of the news we get and a dumbing down of discourse in general....

Judith Rich Harris. No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. New York: Norton, 2006.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... It was evolutionary psychologists who first proposed the idea that the mind is, as Stephen Pinker put in How the Mind Works, "not a single organ but a system of organs, which we can think of as psychological faculties of mental modules."...

Lou Marinoff. The Middle Way: Finding Happiness in a World of Extremes. New York: Sterling, 2007.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2008... These days, our "global village" (a term coined by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s) is awash in either-or arguments, caused in large part by extremists of every kind, who are unwilling to compromise. But Lou Marinoff, a professor of philosophy...

66 years ago, before ETC: Volume 1, Number 1.(RETROSPECT)
April 1, 2008... PLANS FOR A GENERAL SEMANTICS SOCIETY were moving forward by January of 1942. Also envisioned was a general semantics journal. Alfred Korzybski asked Gordon McKnight to be editor, expecting him to produce at least a prospectus to be distributed...

36 years ago, in ETC: Volume 24, Number 4.(RETROSPECT)
April 1, 2008... DEBBIE, an earnest twelve-year-old, stands frustrated at the chalkboard after misspelling several words in spite of the teacher's exhortations to listen to the sounds. Louder, more meticulous enunciations neither lower the tension nor lessen...

Dates and indexes.
April 1, 2008... WE RECENTLY LEARNED of the death of Bernard Chalip, a noted voice instructor, teacher and author in the field of general semantics. Chalip died April 1, 2008 in Alameda, CA, at the age of 90. His singing students included noted performers of...