ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from December 1993

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from December 1993

Cognitive Darwinism: rational-emotive therapy and the theory of neuronal group selection.
December 22, 1993... 5. A. Ellis. Rejoinder: Elegant and Inelegant RET, in A. Ellis and J. Whiteley, eds. Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Rational-Emotive Therapy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1979. 6. G. M. Edelman. The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory...

Financial bombs. (difference in the rewards offered leading to the arrest of terrorists involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1920 bombing of Wall Street)
December 22, 1993... WITH OTHER MEDIA focused on the bombing of the parking garage at the World Trade Center, leave it to the New Yorker to provide a different slant. Its "The Talk of the Town" of March 15, 1993, began: Not only has terrorism struck the financial...

Understanding cultural differences: Janteloven and social conformity in Norway.
December 22, 1993... ONE OF THE persistent themes in general semantics literature is tolerance of cultural diversity. Quotes from a recent article in this journal illustrate this point: "Throughout our history, we have reacted too often to diversity with fear and...

The language problem. (truth and falsehood in linguistic expression)
December 22, 1993... ONE CAN RECOGNIZE the confluence of two tributaries in what I will call the language problem. The first of these (a secular and, to some extent, a psychological tributary) involves the inevitable distortion that arises when translating an inner...

Memory (II). (poem)
December 22, 1993... The present is stillborn, A brief and swiftly moving boundary line Between the future and the past. The instant a word is spoken, Or act performed, or thought imagined, It is already past. "Now" never is, but only was. The future is where we...

Our inflationary language: a metaphor of communication. (Metaphors in Action)
December 22, 1993... WE USE LANGUAGE, that marvelous technology, to talk about our lives, our past, our future. We can even use language to talk about language. But what happens when language changes its role in our lives -- when we start using it differently, or...

River of abstractions. (comparing the process of abstracting to standing in a river) (Education)
December 22, 1993... "USE THE ABSTRACTING PROCESS," I instruct the class, "to explain how I can spot a student doodling and only pretending to take notes." "Map-makers," they inform me, "select information from the environment based on the context of the situation,...

A general semantics glossary. (part 6)
December 22, 1993... multiordinality (m.o.) of terms and mechanisms. This glossary has featured Korzybskian coinages: words invented for his systematic purposes or established terms used in an original way. In this segment, I introduce another coinage, the term...

Jack in the text: from multimedia to hypertext, the written word finds a new home.
December 22, 1993... FORGET ABOUT CYBERSPACE -- all that stuff about virtual universes and electronic immortality is drug-pushing. They're toys for people who can't get enough dead air out of their TV sets. If you want a cyberpunk experience, slap some Public Enemy...

Cinema verite and the criminal element: a perspective.
December 22, 1993... DURING THE LATE 1980s, a new form of television show became popular. This type of programming represents a variant of cinema verite. In this case, real people in everyday situations are the focus of attention. For example, the activities of law...

Afrocentricity, 3d ed.
December 22, 1993... Written from different perspectives and for very different reasons, these two texts deal with the fundamental semantic problem of meaning. In essence, the essays by these scholars are concerned with the question: should we redefine "America"? To...

Reading Ads Socially.
December 22, 1993... Goldman's text is an intellectually sophisticated discussion concerned with the commodity form and processes of ideological reproduction. Beginning with the premise that "there is a great deal more at stake in reading ads than simply whether or...

Media, Consciousness and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought.
December 22, 1993... Walter Ong has long been one of the leading contemporary figures in rhetorical and communication studies. Heavily influenced by his academic mentors (Perry Miller and Marshal McLuhan), Ong has proven to be an innovative and creative theoretician....

"Nice Guys Finish Seventh": False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations.
December 22, 1993... Keyes has written a fascinating text which takes a critical look at many familiar quotations that have become commonplace in our daily conversations. Working from the premise that "misquotes drive out real quotes," the author has discovered three...