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

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

News about the news: changes and challenges in the 1990s.
March 22, 1993... THE MOST BASIC, most important and most difficult question in journalism can be asked in three words: What is news? It's a basic question for anyone beginning the study of journalism or for anyone who learns about the world -- as most of us do --...

Who controls your life? (controlling one's feelings)
March 22, 1993... HE MADE ME ANGRY!" "She makes me feel stupid." Feeling angry and stupid and attributing the cause of the feelings to someone else relieves us of the responsibility for our feelings. If others can control when and if we feel angry, happy, stupid...

Dynamite. (checking out information)
March 22, 1993... IF YOU WANT to reduce the risk of disaster, check the map against the territory. Compare what you think about a situation with ongoing events in the world Out There. Like many families, ours occasionally took the map for granted. While my...

Irving J. Lee: a teacher for our times. (general semantics professor at the Northwestern University)
March 22, 1993... MY RELATIONSHIP WITH Dr. Lee developed during my years as a teaching assistant at Northwestern University. It was through the letter of recommendation from Dr. S. I. Hayakawa, that I received a special teaching assistantship with Dr. Lee. After...

Remembering Irving J. Lee. (general semantics professor at the Northwestern University)
March 22, 1993... EARLY IN 1937 I saw a notice on the bulletin board in my high school. It described a high school institute to be held at Northwestern University School of Speech during the coming summer. A scholarship of seventy-five dollars was offered to...

Why discussions go astray (1947).
March 22, 1993... THE POINTS OF BREAKDOWN in group discussions are many and varied. Much of the time they coincide with the failure of participants to understand each other. Sometimes they occur when the participants understand each other too well. Very often it...

E-Primer: A Tutorial on E-Prime.
March 22, 1993... Paul Dennithorne Johnston. E-Primer: A Tutorial on E-Prime. (MS-DOS version) Distributed by The International Society for General Semantics, Concord, CA. 1992. In his program E-Primer Paul Dennithorne Johnston has created an engaging way for...

A general semantics glossary, part 4. (elementalism) (Lexicon)
March 22, 1993... elementalism/non-elementalism. Korzybski formulated time-binding as the defining human act; the behavior by which humans demonstrate their humanity. Having identified language as the tool of time-binding, Korzybski exerted himself to tease out,...

From "the road" to "the fast track" - American metaphors of life. (Metaphors in Action)
March 22, 1993... LIFE IS A JOURNEY is one of the most ancient and venerable of metaphors. It is a core metaphor of the mystical Chinese philosophy of Taoism: The Tao is The Way, The Path, which is constantly changing. In the English language, we have a series...

Kidnapped by an alien: tales of UFO abductions. (Unidentified Flying Object) (Folklore: Maps and Territories)
March 22, 1993... IN RECENT YEARS stories of alien abductions have increased enormously. "I Was Kidnapped by an Alien" headlines assault us from the pseudo newspapers at checkout stands, and television "unsolved mysteries" programs often feature UFO abduction...

Sex: a review of reviews. (singer Madonna Ciccone's book) (Popular Culture)
March 22, 1993... ELEMENTS OF THE aging baby-boom population, in what they probably now recall as their salad days, used to find it inspirational to fantasize along lines of, "Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came!" The noted pop performer and financial wizard,...

Kimi. (illustrating miscommunication) (Illustrating General Semantics)
March 22, 1993... ONE EVENING, my wife Muriel volunteered to take care of a neighbor's four-year-old girl while her mother studied for an exam. So we drove to the day-care center to get her. Muriel told the woman at the entrance that she had come for Kimi. Some...

The electronic polis: the 1992 election. (Media Analysis)
March 22, 1993... FRANK SESNO, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT for Cable News Network, stared into the camera and urged "interactive viewers" to phone in their opinions about the economy. "If you think the economy is getting better, press one, then the pound sign," he...

All in all that's not all. (general semantics principle of non-allness) (General Semantics Foundations)
March 22, 1993... WE MIGHT THINK OF general-semantics principles and formulations as "semantic ABMs" -- attitudinal and behavioral modifiers -- based on an explicitly stated critical thinking frame of reference and generated from empirical data. Individuals who...

Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy.
March 22, 1993... Prof. Jamieson, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, is currently the pre-eminent American scholar focusing on communication and the political process. In her most recent book, Jamieson considers...

Dancing with Your Books: The Zen Way of Studying.
March 22, 1993... This is not a book about Zen, but rather a text that applies a few Zen principles to the task of studying. And, although the title of book serves notice that its subject is studying, the philosophy and techniques discussed by the author are...

The Age of Missing Information.
March 22, 1993... The connection between television and nature is, at best, imperceptible. Television pulls its viewers into a fantasy world where image and appearance are everything, and variety is a four-letter word. Nature, on the other hand, challenges our...

Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media.
March 22, 1993... Lee and Solomon's examination of bias in the news media is a provocative and compelling read. Exploring a range of topics from corporate and government control of the media to sexual and racial prejudice in the media, the authors portray an...