ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from December 1995

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from December 1995

The red flags of persuasion. (persuasive speech)
December 22, 1995... The rhetorical methods of Rush Limbaugh have previously received extended analysis in ETC. (See Chris Boyd's "Speaking Rushian" in the Fall 1994 issue). Yet, further scrutiny of Mr. Limbaugh's performance seems warranted, for he and his imitators...

Talking wild. (relationship between humans and nature)
December 22, 1995... Murray Bookchin (1991) uses the terms "first nature" and "second nature" as a way of distinguishing the nonhuman and social spheres. Bookchin asserts that first nature is constituted by the natural world, everything that isn't artifactual....

Worries about words. (etymology)
December 22, 1995... Derivations of a word are often as intriguing as the sorts of explanations psychologists come up with for human behavior. Etymology and psychology, indeed, have much in common -- so much so that maybe we should think of language in the way we...

The power of powers: schemes, scams, and panties.
December 22, 1995... Have you heard of the latest, sexist, women-only twist on the traditional chain letter? It seems that women from San Francisco to Australia are being urged to forward new panties to the name at the head of a list and add their...

Clones on first. (language and intelligence)
December 22, 1995... In the 23rd century, engineers aboard Baseball Planet developed cloning to produce cheap, obedient, baseball players. Clones get no pay. Thus, the entrepreneurs' single-minded pursuit of profit led to great technological advance. Clones...

Coposing Zen haiku: training to make sense.
December 22, 1995... I've titled this paper "Composing Zen Haiku: Training to Make Sense" because I think the practice of composing haiku requires a discipline in a person's thinking and emoting patterns similar to, and in some ways as rigorous as, the general...

Pathological communication patterns in Heller's 'Catch-22.'
December 22, 1995... In Schizophrenia, the foremost psychotic disorder, patients suffer from thought and communication breakdown. One of the theories concerning the development of schizophrenia ties it to patterns of pathological communication within the family...

'Glossing over' feminism?: a general semantics critique.
December 22, 1995... It makes sense that the term feminism would find its way into an array of glossaries, because the function of a glossary, in general, is to define and clarify difficult terms. In our culture the word "feminism" covers enough ideological,...

Virtual reality as metaphor.
December 22, 1995... Virtual reality has caught people's imaginations and inspired fantasies far out of proportion to what the technology can actually deliver, now (1995) or in the foreseeable future. Virtual reality technology promises to immerse you in an...

Concerning an E-prime translation of the Bible.
December 22, 1995... An occasional section in ETC., "Insights" will feature novel and innovative applications of general semantics and alternative perspectives on contemporary topics. When D. David Bourland, Jr., looks for possible sources of material to...

Schoolspeak: breaking the code. (terms used by public school officials)
December 22, 1995... Richard D. Haymes recently offered a rather cynical glossary of terms from corporate America (ETC., Summer, 1995, 222-227). Haymes argues that corporations are facing unprecedented demands, resulting in a body of language that masks unpleasant...

A general semantcis glossary (part XIII).
December 22, 1995... general uncertainty. In my thirty years of teaching general semantics I have encountered enthusiasts who seemed to see general-semantics as an appropriately certain system designed to replace all former inappropriately certain systems. They...