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

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

Remembering Don Hayakawa. (general semanticist, profesor and former US senator)
June 22, 1993... What does your father do?" "He's a general semanticist." Try saying that when you're in nursery school. By the time the kids got big enough to say "What's that?" I had a new answer ready. "It's the study of how not to make a damn fool of...

To a poet a thousand years hence. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I WHO am dead a thousand years, And wrote this sweet archaic song, Send you my words for messengers The way I shall not pass along. I care not if you bridge the seas, Or ride secure the cruel sky, Or build consummate palaces Of metal or of...

The empty eye. (the effects of television on society)
June 22, 1993... Modern society inundates its citizens not only with a Niagara of words, but also, these days, with a torrent of pictures. Television spews out both words and pictures in dizzying quantity and variety: movies, talk shows, cartoons, dramatic...

Linguistic virtual reality: is there no way out?
June 22, 1993... MORE THAN TWO DECADES of research and development have contributed to a "reality" produced by technology. Virtual reality refers to a world accessible through technology and subject to manipulation by those who access it. Some extensions of...

What is the Zen master talking about? (analyzing basic Zen terms)
June 22, 1993... I INTEND IN THE FOLLOWING to make sense of Zen non-sense. Fundamental Zen terms like "naturalness" and "emptiness" and "nothingness" are used in disregard of the COIK principle: Clear Only If Known. For example, Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen master,...

Vietnam Veterans' Memorial: universal symbolism.
June 22, 1993... WHILE ATTENDING a recent meeting of the Academy of Marketing Science in Washington, D. C., I had the opportunity to visit the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. Doing so gave me a brief opportunity to relive my emotions of those tumultuous Vietnam War...

Success, ghosts, and things. (success as an achievement process)
June 22, 1993... DOES SUCCESS MATTER? It seems as if we've defined two types of people, the successful, and the other kind. How do you rate yourself? I've had problems with such two-valued judgments. Have you? Somewhere in the process of growing up I decided to...

80,000 books. (language manipulation) (The Mathsemantic Monitor)
June 22, 1993... IF YOU AND YOUR TEACHERS read a total of 80,000 -- yes, 80 thousand -- books this year, I'll sit on the roof for a day." This was the challenge principal George Young threw to the 418 students of Denbo Elementary School in Browns Mills, N.J.,...

A general semantics glossary. (defining semantic reaction)(part 5) (Lexicon)
June 22, 1993... semantic reaction (s.r.). In formulating his unique system, Korzybski discovered/decided that he had to coin many terms. When he did so, consciously, rigorously formulated those terms so that they would qualify as non-elementalistic; that is,...

"The nineties" - an empty metaphor waiting to be filled. (Metaphors in Action)
June 22, 1993... "THESE ARE THE NINETIES" people will say, as if they're saying something meaningful. The phrase "the Nineties" creeps into conversations in odd moments, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. Ads, of course, sell us the styles of "the Nineties."...

An exploratory analysis of responses to owned messages in interpersonal communication. (Communication Research)
June 22, 1993... THE PRESCRIPTION TO "own" one's messages is ubiquitous in interpersonal communication textbooks and training. (1) Referred to by various titles (e.g., "I-messages," "owning thoughts and feelings," "speaking for self"), the skill involves the use...

Poltergeists - a phenomenon worthy of serious study. (Folklore: Maps and Territories)
June 22, 1993... FOLKLORISTS FOCUS ON STORIES, tales, legends, proverbs, riddles, and jokes -- all genres that contain artistic elements and lend themselves easily to analysis and comparative studies. In the area of folk belief, studies in the past have...

Education for the 21st century. (Institute of General Semantics conference in Columbia University, New York, New York) (Conference Report)
June 22, 1993... LITERACY HAS TRADITIONALLY been thought of in terms of "reading and writing." Illiteracy in that context remains a problem in the world today. But, literacy also is taking on a broader meaning, as technology and other factors necessitate...

Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values.
June 22, 1993... The tone of Medved's critique of American film, popular music, and television is indicated in one of his concluding paragraphs: In the final analysis, I worry about the impact of medial messages not only on my children but on myself -- and on...

Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously.
June 22, 1993... The over-arching purpose of Bianculli's book is to put television in perspective. By taking on the critics of the medium, Bianculli attempts to balance the typical negative reactions toward television with a consideration of the many positives...

How to Watch TV News.
June 22, 1993... Although the topic of this book is television news and how to watch it critically, the perspective offered by the authors can be generalized to other types of television programming. For instance, a theme that underlies the text is the claim:...

The New Propaganda: The Dictatorship of Palaver in Contemporary Politics.
June 22, 1993... Next to interpersonal communication, Combs and Nimmo argue that the "new propaganda," is the major form of communication in the modern world because it pervades our environment. "When we go to the mall before Christmas and buy a Barbie doll, or...

Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture.
June 22, 1993... Sometimes we use words indiscriminately. For example, whenever we attribute motive to another person, and use words such as "constricted," "repressed" and perhaps even the more accurate "anal retentive" to describe another person, we "speak...