et Cetera back issues from January 2005:
A GENERAL SEMANTICS APPROACH TO SCHOOL-AGE BULLYING
Jan 01, 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. Statistics show the extent of the problem in the United ...
WIKIPEDIA AND THE DISAPPEARING "AUTHOR"
Jan 01, 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 antiquity come to us as accounts of words spoken by ...
THE MEDIUM IS THE MOBLOG
Jan 01, 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 instantaneousness of electronic journalism with the ...
OUR LIVES AS A COMPLEX OF RHYTHMS
Jan 01, 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. General semantics postulates that we live in a world ...
SHORT-CIRCUITING ACHIEVEMENT AND PERFORMANCE WITH ELEMENTALISTIC PSEUDO-BIFURCATION
Jan 01, 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 grade. "Which is more important, trying really hard ...
CALLING OUT THE SYMBOL RULERS
Jan 01, 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 motivations, intentions, reactions, and evaluations of ...
CORRESPONDENCE
Jan 01, 2005; ... What's in a Name? 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 changes, therefore, or some ...
GENERAL SEMANTICS AND PUBLIC SPEAKING: Perspectives on Rhetoric Comparing Aristotle, Hitler, and Korzybski
Jan 01, 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 the geometries of Lobatchevsky and Riemann. Similarly, ...
THE TWO LEVELS OF WRITING TO THE POINT
Jan 01, 2005; ... WHEN BUSINESS WRITERS speak about writing to the point, they usually have in mind either the concept level or the fluency level of the document. The concept level centers on the single, most critical point of the document; the fluency level focuses the economy of language. These are entirely ...
WHAT I BELIEVE
Jan 01, 2005; ... We must begin to realize our potentialities as humans, then we may approach the future with some hope. 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 ...
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Jan 01, 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 pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more ...
Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington
Jan 01, 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 uses that idea to detail the parallel lives of ...
QUOTES
Jan 01, 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 numerous than this mode of estimating will imply. The word ...
EVALUATING WITH CARTOONS
Jan 01, 2005; ... TRYING 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 can we devise tests about language behavior when that may ...
ABSTRACTIONS
Jan 01, 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 and not with bare facts. J. SAMUELBOIS, THE ART ...
TIME-BINDING IN THE INFORMATION AGE
Jan 01, 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 for more than two decades, has analyzed and pondered ...
ANTI-SPIN: USING INTERNET RESOURCES TO UNWIND POLITICAL CLAIMS
Jan 01, 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 participation of millions of citizen contributors ...
POLITICAL CONVENTIONS, IMAGES, AND SPIN
Jan 01, 2005; ... September 2, 2004 THE POLITICAL CONVENTIONS have not served any real substantive purpose in JJL 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 the parties often are made public before ...
Jung: A Biography
Jan 01, 2005; ... Deirdre Bair. Jung: A Biography, Boston: Little Brown, 2003. Deirdre Bair, author of biographies on Ana'fs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, offers in this book compelling and solidly researched insights into Carl Jung, a seminal figure in psychology who is responsible for many terms that are ...
FROM LINEAR MYTHS TO MUSICAL MODELS OF COMMUNICATION
Jan 01, 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 textbooks abound with linear models of ...
The Muse of History and the Science of Culture
Jan 01, 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 'meaning'? Can we discern its trends? What ...
RETROSPECT
Jan 01, 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 Newsweek, was entrusted with setting up the ...