ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from December 1994

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from December 1994

The real-time blues (an Internet tale).
December 22, 1994... BELINDA BAILEY was in love with discovery; loved a good mystery whether of the complexities of nature or simply a well-told tale. Just so long as it spun the ol' mental wheels well up. An admitted addict of that special rush when endorphins gush...

The symbol user and the animal (with a nod to Kenneth Burke).
December 22, 1994... CHARLIE HAS never been to Africa. However, he knows a lot about Africa. Charlie has read books about Africa. He has heard lectures about Africa. He has talked with people who have been to Africa. Symbols let Charlie travel without leaving home....

In search of the un-speakable.
December 22, 1994... ONE DAY, you stroll into an art gallery. You see a painting, a landscape, still life, or abstract, and you pause to savor its beauty. The picture fires your imagination. In it, you see many wonderful things. But you feel incomplete. Something...

Abstractions.
December 22, 1994... The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new development. ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD The volume of political comment substantially exceeds the available truth, so columnists run out of truth, and then must resort to...

The interaction of experience and language.
December 22, 1994... ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD expressed some cogent criticisms of Zeno's "arrow" paradox. Zeno designed his paradox to demonstrate that motion or change is impossible; that is, because an arrow in flight is always at rest exactly where it is at every...

On the phenomenon of communication across time and space. (poem)
December 22, 1994... Our minds (yours and mine) meet in the now of this very line: Our thinkings intertwine though we have never met! And indeed I may be dead, although you cannot be (not yet). Nevertheless, from as far away as even beyond the grave, I conduct...

Our impregnable, uncommunicative cat. (poem)
December 22, 1994... Our impregnable cat, Protected (also) from fleas and feline distemper, And provided with ample shelter and delectable foods, Our cat (relieved of procreation) Who lives primarily to eat And knows at whose door her bread is buttered -- Dropped out...

The rainbow promise (on the integrity of territory). (poem)
December 22, 1994... Every object commands obedience to its dimensions, Mandating conditions for its inches and labor for its weight. No shape will fit into its places until accommodated. Distance insists on describing every rod of its domain, And no mile or step of...

You are nothing but a pack of neurons.
December 22, 1994... "YOU ARE nothing but a pack of neurons." Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick makes this astonishing declaration on the first page of his latest book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994). What does Crick mean? In this brief...

Economic metaphors for education.
December 22, 1994... AS WE BECOME increasingly obsessed with money and the bottom line, we look for the bottom line in nearly everything, importing this metaphor from accounting into many other situations. Often, this helps us cut through the details of a complex and...

From a "rational" structure to a "socio-technical" system: a whole-mind metaphor for organizational change.
December 22, 1994... I WORKED FOR a company that decided to redesign its organizational structure. Leaders of this particular company, Star Insurance Corporation (a pseudonym), concluded that the development of "self-managed, interdisciplinary teams" (as opposed to a...

The aphorism.
December 22, 1994... WHAT IS AN APHORISM? What makes it quotable and memorable? Aside from its condensed, witty quality, it must, like a joke, be somehow surprising, either in thought or phrasing. The best aphorisms, like the best witticisms, are repeated with...

A general semantics glossary, part IX.
December 22, 1994... extensional devices: indexing and dating. Korzybski used his "extensional devices" throughout the First Edition of Science and Sanity. In the Introduction to the Second Edition he listed them explicitly, along with the related formulation of...

Violence.
December 22, 1994... WHILE VIOLENCE IS AN important element of the mass media, the actual effects this violence has on audiences has stimulated heated debate. A great deal depends upon how we define violence. If we define it broadly, and involve matters such as...

Common sense principles about language.
December 22, 1994... 1. THE WORD is not the thing. You can't eat the word "apple" or shoot the word "gun." In many ways, words are like maps. The more accurately the map describes the territory, the more useful it is. Maps can be wrong, and often are. There are...

Mathsemantics: Making Numbers Talk Sense.
December 22, 1994... Edward MacNeal, a market research consultant specializing in air travel analysis, has served as executive secretary of the International Society for General Semantics. This puts him in a ringside seat from which to observe our many foibles and...