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

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

Sigma-EOS: a fourth non-Aristotelian model.
September 22, 1998... 1. Introduction: Various Non-Aristotelian Models Alfred Korzybski asserted that he "produced and formulated General Semantics as the foundation of the first non-Aristotelian system, based on the discovery of new relations, and so psycho-logical...

Rogue asteroid? (fiction)(excerpt from 'The Clone Chronicles')
September 22, 1998... From an academic's notes, circa 2295 Professor Sigmoid Swift attributes a rogue asteroid's annihilation of Earth to a failure to think in E-Prime. The historian making such a claim from the safety of another planet might well become the butt...

Our addiction to attributive adjectives.
September 22, 1998... We humans differ radically from other animals because we use sophisticated symbolic languages in thinking and speaking. We use our languages to represent persons and things and to facilitate the creation of thoughts. We misuse our language when...

The language of 'TV Guide' program synopses and program advertisements - a comparison.
September 22, 1998... Introduction In some ways, news reporting and print advertising copy have long had a close association which has confused some readers. Merrill DeVoe, in his 1956 primer on writing advertising copy, notes that ad exec Albert Lasker (a partner...

Semantics, general semantics, and ecology in Frank Herbert's 'Dune.'
September 22, 1998... Frank Herbert's Dune, a thematically rich and varied work of science fiction, is the first novel in a trilogy about the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, and the rise to power of Paul Atreides, its messianic leader. Herbert initially conceived of...

'Theories' in everyday situations.
September 22, 1998... Theories or doctrines are always linguistic. They formulate something which is going on inside our skin in relation to what is going on on the un-speakable levels, and which is not a theory. Theories are the rational means for a rational being to...

Number-English: a dictionary (all-ant).
September 22, 1998... This is the second installment of a dictionary addressing the difficulty of hitching ordinary language to scientific language, a difficulty that arises because the two languages aren't equal. Ordinary language has great scope and comes to us...

Is television a "text"?
September 22, 1998... A metaphor has crept into common use in academic discourse about television. The metaphor asserts that a television program is a "text." A companion metaphor describes watching and interpreting the program as "reading." I will argue in this...

The Argument Culture: Moving From Debate to Dialogue.
September 22, 1998... Deborah Tannen. New York: Random House, 1998. Deborah Tannen, a noted linguist, professor, and author of the bestseller You Just Don't Understand, decries in The Argument Culture what she considers our compulsive desire to use combative...

Drug Crazy: How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out.
September 22, 1998... Mike Gray. New York: Random House, 1998. Mike Gray, the author of The China Syndrome, has written a well-documented although one-sided condemnation of the federal government's more than 80-year-old war on drugs. In Drug Crazy you will learn...

A Beautiful Mind.
September 22, 1998... Sylvia Nasar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. A Beautiful Mind is the biography of a mathematical genius who went mad, recovered late in life, and won the Nobel prize in Economics in 1994 for work he had done forty-five years earlier. John...

Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley.
September 22, 1998... Stuart Berg Flexner and Anne H. Soukhanov. New York: Oxford, 1997. This work, drawing on the late Stuart Berg Flexner's two most popular books - I Hear America Talking and Listening to America - provides a sweeping look at the richness and...