ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from January 2005

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from January 2005

A general semantics approach to school-age bullying.
January 1, 2005... SCHOOL-AGE BULLYING, from elementary to high school, is a major problem not only in America but throughout the world. Research indicates that school-age bullying is not confined to any national, religious, or ethno-cultural group. ...

What I believe.(excerpt)(Excerpt)
January 1, 2005... I AM DEEPLY HONORED to participate in the Symposium, The Faith I Live By, compiled and edited by Krishna M. Talgeri, and to contribute this paper particularly written for the contemplative audience of Indian readers. (1) This is the first...

The medium is the moblog.
January 1, 2005... MOBLOGGING, a blend of the words mobile and weblogging, involves using a PDA or cell phone camera "in the field" to post words and pictures to a personal or business web site. Based on an inherently nomadic medium, moblogging merges the...

Quotes.
January 1, 2005... We must discriminate between the extent and variety of creation, and the paucity of language. The number of unassociated sights is very small, if we estimate them by the number of words which name such sights. They are, however, far more...

Wikipedia and the disappearing "author".(piece of writing)
January 1, 2005... WHAT DOES it mean to author a piece of writing? For many generations, humans inscribed clay tablets and recorded information on papyrus but only rarely included their own names in the documents they produced. Many of the most famous works of...

Time-binding in the Information Age.
January 1, 2005... MANY (if not most) businesses (by this author's estimation) are using organizational structures and management approaches that are not well suited for today's (circa 2005) business challenges. The author has suffered through such organizations...

Short-circuiting achievement and performance with elementalistic pseudo-bifurcation.
January 1, 2005... NOT LONG AGO, a student e-mailed my supervisor to complain that I had unfairly given a failing grade, although the student had attended every class and had repeated three of the tests. Effort alone, the student claimed, should earn a passing...

Evaluating with cartoons.
January 1, 2005... TRYING TO EVALUATE what students know, and how well they can apply what they know of general semantics "rules," seems to belong to a class of testing known as "unsatisfactory." People can understand various aspects of their behavior, but how...

Our lives as a complex of rhythms.
January 1, 2005... IN OUR EVERYDAY activities and relationships, we often think and act as if things don't change. We think of 'things' as staying basically the same, not as 'objects,' 'things,' 'situations,' and 'persons' at a date, as stages in a process, etc....

Abstractions.
January 1, 2005... Awareness of abstraction would reduce the number of "why?" questions and "because" answers. Or it would at least make us realize that when we are dealing with whys and becauses we are dealing with interpretations, projections, and opinions...

Calling out the symbol rulers.
January 1, 2005... NOTHING ILLUSTRATES the power of symbols and language quite like a presidential election. Of course, those of us who know a little bit of general semantics recognize that this "power" lies not in the words and symbols themselves, but in the...

Political conventions, images, and spin.
January 1, 2005... September 2, 2004 THE POLITICAL CONVENTIONS have not served any real substantive purpose in the democratic process for years. By the time they roll around, we already know who the candidates of the two parties will be. The platforms of...

What's in a name?(CORRESPONDENCE)
January 1, 2005... To people with an understanding of general semantics, polarized thinking qualifies as simplistic, even counter-productive. The use of labeling falls into the same category. Political terms that suffer from both shortcomings warrant some...

Semantics and the 2004 election.(CORRESPONDENCE)
January 1, 2005... I'm now sorry I did not send Bush and Kerry copies of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." It would not have changed the election results, but, if they and their handlers had read it, it might have provided a more enlightened...

Anti-spin: using Internet resources to unwind political claims.
January 1, 2005... THE RECENT ELECTION broke records in many areas--most first-time voters, most people voting for a winning candidate, most people voting for a losing candidate, probably most money every spent per candidate, etc. This election also enjoyed the...

General semantics and public speaking: perspectives on rhetoric comparing Aristotle, Hitler, and Korzybski.
January 1, 2005... THERE ARE MANY WAYS of looking at human behavior. As a result we may have "many psychologies," rather than "one psychology." The same is true of geometry. Euclid's way of looking at the patterns and forms of measurement is but one along with...

From linear myths to musical models of communication.(METAPHORS IN ACTION)(Editorial)
January 1, 2005... A MODEL IS a simplification. But a model is meant to make clear some underlying dynamics of a complex situation. It fosters metaphors which fit into the model's structures. It is also helpful if the model can be diagrammed visually. Our...

Jung: A Biography.(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Deirdre Bair. Jung: A Biography. Boston: Little Brown, 2003. Deirdre Bair, author of biographies on Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, offers in this book compelling and solidly researched insights into Carl Jung, a seminal figure in...

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... John M. Barry. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York: Viking, 2004. In 1918 an influenza virus emerged--probably in the United States--that would spread around the world. Before that worldwide...

The Muse of History and the Science of Culture.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Robert L. Carneiro. The Muse of History and the Science of Culture. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000. "Is history more than 'a mere chronological series of remarkable events'? Does it have a pattern? Is it fraught with...

Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Daniel Mark Epstein. Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. New York: Ballantine, 2004. The Greek historian Plutarch said the biography of the individual gains in significance when it is paired with another. This book...

Retrospect.
January 1, 2005... One of the foremost authorities of our time in the field of psychological warfare has written a volume of extraordinary interest to students of semantics. And Mr. Barrett's qualifications are exceptional: he has served as one of the editors of...