ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from June 1997

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from June 1997

Full circle: general semantics and the law.
June 22, 1997... General semantics has for years been noted for its multi-disciplinary utility. Few, if any, sets of techniques or insights are as applicable to so many endeavors: from anthropology to zoology, from musicology to management, from poetry to...

The "meaning" of First Amendment Speech.
June 22, 1997... At the heart of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, and at the center of the United States Supreme Court's opinions safeguarding that freedom, lie two "simple" yet deeply complicated and often paradoxical questions: what meaning...

Reducing misunderstandings in trying to reach agreements.
June 22, 1997... The kinds of agreements people try to come to would seem to have a good deal to do with the particular ways in which they manage to misunderstand one another. In general, there would appear to be two possible types of agreement - and any number...

My secondhand life. (personal narrative on impersonal symbols in a complex world)
June 22, 1997... I live a secondhand life. Mostly. Occasionally I experience the ebb and flow of firsthand life. Rarely. Let me state my case. I get up in the morning. Although I consider this worthy of congratulation, nobody else does. Numb with sleep, I...

A sporting proposition. (improved sports newswriting)
June 22, 1997... If you could on average - dream along with me here - win four out of ten points playing tennis against Andre Agassi, then, based on pure chance, how many of your matches would you likely win from him? Before getting to the answer, let's just...

Developing a self-referencing system.(The Matrix, part 3)
June 22, 1997... Introduction We've all experienced points of keen awareness, animal intuition, where thought seems fluid as water, time seems to disappear. Or those disconcerting; moments, when we find we've driven miles and not seen the road, read paragraphs...

ISGS adventures in San Francisco. (International Society for General Semantics)
June 22, 1997... Robert Wanderer gives us a colorful history of the San Francisco Chapter of ISGS: This is the saga of the San Francisco Chapter of the International Society for General Semantics. During our nearly 40 years we have presented more than 500...

The last general semantics symposium at Ambassador University.
June 22, 1997... Dr. David F. Maas and the English Department of Ambassador University at Big Sandy, Texas, sponsored their Fourth Annual Invitational General Semantics Symposium held on March 30 and 31, 1997. This brings to a conclusion an increasingly fine...

Artificial intelligence - metaphor or oxymoron?
June 22, 1997... The field of artificial intelligence is interesting to a student of metaphor, because it was explicitly founded upon a metaphor - several of them, in fact. In the 1950s, a group of scientists decided to try to provide the computer with...

General semantics formulations in David Burns' Feeling Good.
June 22, 1997... In 1980, David D. Burn's popular self-help book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy appeared. Burns, an M.D., wanted to make cognitive therapy "user friendly" for the lay person. I believe that he has accomplished his objective. In addition, I...

A general semantics glossary.(Glossary)
June 22, 1997... validity and truth. Alfred Tarski (1902-1983) is "credited with advancing the semantic method, a procedure for examining the relationship between an expression and the object to which it refers"; what we might consider a subset of...

Phonology, morphology, syntax, and ... squirrelly semantics.
June 22, 1997... Whenever a teacher sets out to give a course on a subject which covers an extremely wide area, such as semantics, he or she obviously has to choose between focusing too narrowly and hence treating only a small part of the field, and trying to...

Understanding McLuhan.
June 22, 1997... Marshall McLuhan's most famous quote is, "The medium is the message." By this he meant that all media have effects on the human psyche quite apart from the explicit bits of information they might convey. So what was the effect that this CD-ROM...

The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys Through Knowledge.
June 22, 1997... James Burke shows us, in an instructive and entertaining way, that knowledge has many unforeseen and surprising effects. The book, for example, owes its existence to a mistake made by German jeweler Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century....

Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights.
June 22, 1997... Nadine Strossen explains that "pornography" is a vague term, which Webster's International Dictionary defines as "a depiction (as in writing or painting)... of erotic behavior designed to cause sexual excitement." In essence, it is sexual...

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.
June 22, 1997... "We share 98 percent of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees. What makes us different - our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology - is the result of individual ingenuity, that was recognized, rewarded, and...

Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
June 22, 1997... The cliche "Necessity is the mother of invention" seems particularly apt for discussing the development of the computer, whose history begins in the nineteenth century. During that century, as this book tells us, the Industrial Revolution caused...

"The Sex Side of Life": Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education.
June 22, 1997... I for one Think the country would be better run, If Mary Ware Dennett Explained things to the Senate. So wrote Ogden Nash of this suffragette, leading figure of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, prominent peace activist, crusader for the...

The Good Society: The Humane Agenda.
June 22, 1997... John Kenneth Galbraith, perhaps North America's best known economist, has developed a concise and well-argued "humane agenda" to bring about an achievable "good society." In terms of what's good, Galbraith believes it to be a society which...

The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore.
June 22, 1997... This book is a sequel to Doublespeak: From Revenue Enhancement to Terminal Living in which the author continues to document the latest doublespeak that tries to pass as legitimate communication. Lutz considers doublespeak as language that is...