ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from December 1998

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from December 1998

Marriage - vicious and delicious circles.
December 22, 1998... Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don't work here on Earth. Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue Like many married couples, Carol and Steve agreed "perfectly on what was wrong with their marriage - the other...

The unspeakables.
December 22, 1998... We have chronicled various technical and social microcosms of clones and cloning in the 23rd century. Let us now look at the macrocosm, especially the changing political-economic structure that fostered the development of such investment-heavy...

The problem of labeling: the semantics of behavior.
December 22, 1998... Introductory note: For our training programs the pages on which talks such as this one appear have three columns. In the small left hand column suggested time values are given, corresponding to sections of the talk, so that they can be...

Exchange of symbols.
December 22, 1998... About a century or two ago, the Pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Rome. Naturally there was a big uproar from the Jewish community. So the Pope made a deal. He would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community. If...

The assumptions we die by.
December 22, 1998... Forty-one years ago, in 1958, I wrote an essay for ETC, "The Assumptions We Live By." Now, with all but one of my seven children established and independent, the computer and internet a major presence, and after successful bouts with asthma,...

Metaphors around the TV remote control.
December 22, 1998... We are given a small, rectangular piece of plastic with buttons on it. We are told it is a "remote control." We point it at the television, move our thumb, press a button, and the channel changes. What are we doing? What do we call this action?...

Learning about structures in relationships.
December 22, 1998... This summer, 17 students at Alverno College in Milwaukee participated in a unique, four-day, three-credit pilot course that I designed as a seminar in general semantics. Milton Dawes was the principle guest lecturer and focused daily lessons on...

General semantics on the Internet.
December 22, 1998... What do you think of when you think of general semantics? Alfred Korzybski? Science and Sanity? IGS? ISGS? ETC? If I stick with E-Prime, I can avoid telling you what gs 'is'. (Probably helpful for all of us.) But whatever gs 'is', you can find...

A modest proposal....(International Society for General Semantics' activities)
December 22, 1998... If it is an historical fact and also a psycho-logical fact that a time-binding class of life has to have periods of development, let us have them! - AK Welcome to the first installment of what might end up as a regular column in ETC....

The Footnote: A Curious History.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Anthony Graffon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Footnotes have had their detractors. Noel Coward said reading one was like having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of lovemaking. Voltaire's position was...

The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Timothy Ferris. New York: Touchstone, 1997. In his latest book, Timothy Ferris, a skilled and experienced best-selling science writer, provides a comprehensive and comprehensible account of how science today envisions the universe as a...

News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Pete Hamill. New York: Ballantine, 1998. In this extended essay, journalist and novel-writer Pete Hamill tells us that more and more Americans find newspapers uninteresting and irrelevant - they'd rather watch television. Hamill, who loves...

The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky. New York: Villard, 1998. The American Heritage Dictionary defines an expert as "a person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject." But, as The Experts Speak points out, that does...

Opium: A History.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Martin Booth. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. English author Martin Booth has written a nearly complete history of opium, the substance from which morphine and heroin are derived. In this book you will find that as far back as Hippocrates...

Biophysics, linguistics and the unity of science.(Fifty Years Ago in 'ETC')
December 22, 1998... FIFTY YEARS AGO IN ETC Our body of scientific knowledge is not spread evenly over all possible subject matter. People have been led to examine this or that facet of the universe for this or that reason; at any one moment there exists a...

Semantics in international relations.(Fifty Years Ago in 'ETC')
December 22, 1998... The tricks which politicians have played with language through the ages to lead and to mislead people is the subject of a large literature. Usually the discussion is confined to the past rather than the present for the simple reason that...

General semantics: a tool for the counselor.(Fifty Years Ago in 'ETC')
December 22, 1998... The counselor who employs general semantics in his professional life sees the client in a different light. Information which has hitherto been routinely entered on the data sheet during an initial interview takes on new meanings, for the...

Horace Bushnell reconsidered.(Fifty Years Ago in 'ETC')(general semanticist)
December 22, 1998... In a sense, 1849 was the beginning of a century of scientific optimism. Sharing this optimism, Bushnell was among those who stood for a language rooted in the exact, empirically demonstrated relations of fact. Like most of the men of his day -...

Review.(book 'Education for What is Real' by Dr. Earl C. Kelly)
December 22, 1998... General semanticists will be familiar with the concept that Dr. Kelley presents of reality as relationship between the observer and observed; with his explanation that reality, far from existing separately in the "outside world," apparently is...

Education for What is Real.(Review)
December 22, 1998... General semanticists will be familiar with the concept that Dr. Kelley presents of reality as relationship between the observer and observed; with his explanation that reality, far from existing separately in the "outside world," apparently is...

The Communication of Ideas.(Fifty Years Ago in 'ETC')(Review)
December 22, 1998... Surely one of the more remarkable phenomena of the last twenty or thirty years is the steadily increasing interest in man as a symbol-user, the growing conviction that our individual and mass insanities can be treated only when we understand...