et Cetera back issues from April 2008:
FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Apr 01, 2008; ... I CONSIDER IT AN HONOR and a privilege to have been appointed as the new Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics, and I want to thank the IGS Board of Trustees for the trust that they have placed in me. The Institute, and the International Society for General Semantics with ...
THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN WORD & IMAGE
Apr 01, 2008; ... 55th Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture [Editor's Note: On October 26, 2007, Leonard Shlain, author of Alphabet Versus the Goddess, delivered the 55th Annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture. Mr. Shlain holds the position of Chairman of Laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific ...
SILENT RESONANCE
Apr 01, 2008; ... Early spring; the water is cold. You place your hands upon it, palms open; flat, as if to float upon the surface of life. This sea; your life; my life ... all the space between, invisible; an ...
IN THIS ISSUE
Apr 01, 2008; ... KORZYBSKI WROTE IN SCIENCE & SANITY that "without the consciousness of abstracting, we all become nearly helpless and hopeless semantic victims of a primitive-made language and its underlying structural metaphysics." On our cover this issue we present a work titled "Consciousness as a ...
FROM 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Apr 01, 2008; ... Time-Binding Tales The First Steps [Editor's Note: On March 19, 2008, the eminent inventor, futurist, and science fiction writer, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, died at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at age 91. Clarke's clear-eyed view of human nature figured large at the beginning of his most ...
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: ABSTRACTIONS
Apr 01, 2008; ... I WOULD DEFEND THE LIBERTY of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent. The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing ...
AN ACCOUNT, KORZYBSKI OLD CHAP, OF THIS THING OF OURS
Apr 01, 2008; ... A word is not a thing, It's a thing that is not a thing, or It's not a thing like other things, A word is not a thing-thing. A thing can be many things, This thing or that thing, one thing or the other thing, A thing or the thing, your own thing or ...
I REMEMBER BEING BORN
Apr 01, 2008; ... I REMEMBER BEING BORN! "Nonsense" you say? Well I've certainly heard that most of my life. Nonetheless there's little doubt any more that I do remember an experience of birth. I was all of sixty years old before this was verified as a true birth memory, and then a fair amount of luck was ...
WHY JOHNNY HAS DIFFICULTY MAKING HIS POINT: GENERAL SEMANTICS, CRITICAL THINKING, AND STUDENT WRITING
Apr 01, 2008; ... MOST WHO READ this publication probably either know from experience or have heard through the semantic grapevine that we can develop more precision in our evaluations if we apply the principles of general semantics. And many of us who teach attempt to help our students do just that. But what ...
EXAMINING FIVE "OVER/UNDER-DEFINED" TERMS USED IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Apr 01, 2008; ... GENERAL SEMANTICS VIEWS most terms as over/under defined: "They are over-defined (over-limited) by intension, or verbal definition, because of our belief in the definition; and are hopelessly under-defined by extension or facts ...." (1) Over/under-defined terms are indeterminate in extensional ...
HOW PSEUDO-SCIENTISTS GET AWAY WITH IT
Apr 01, 2008; ... EACH MONTH more people read astrological journals than read Harper's, The Saturday Review, ETC., and Science combined. Millions of Americans, including many university graduates, guide their affairs at least in part by the position of the stars, juxtapositions of tea leaves, configurations on ...
SELF
Apr 01, 2008; ... WITH WHOM DO YOU SPEAK when you talk to yourself? A spirit? An angel? Some wry little elf? A watcher? A pilot? Some brain-dwelling troll? A Zeitgeist? A psyche? Someone in control? A tiny dictator who rules from inside? Some psychic hitch-hiker along for the ride? An organ or tissue ...
WHEN IS A WALL NOT A WALL?
Apr 01, 2008; ... HIS AWARENESS OF PAIN AND DARKNESS drifted in and out. The GS Detective lay on his back. He opened his eyes. He couldn't see. He closed his eyes. He was lying on something hard and cold. Where was he? His head hurt so much, it hardly mattered. He remembered a noise at his back ...
ARTS REPORTING AND THE GRADATION OF ABSTRACTION
Apr 01, 2008; ... S.I. HAYAKAWA'S DISCUSSION of how people use and react to words in Language in Thought and Action can be applied to explain why classical music journalism has a small readership. Often, the words in these articles describing the fine arts are so high on the ladder of abstraction that many people ...
MAPPING INSTRUCTION WITH MEDIA
Apr 01, 2008; ... GENERAL SEMANTICIST J. SAMUEL BOIS (1978, 6) stated that "[a] revolution is a radical and irreversible change in a fundamental element in our way of life." He describes the technical developments which are occurring today as a revolution making modern lives vastly different from those of their ...
DO WORDS HAVE INHERENT MEANING?
Apr 01, 2008; ... IN AUGUST 2007, PARTICIPANTS on the Institute of General Semantics Forum discussed the frequently quoted statement "words don't mean, people mean," and the question of whether or not words have inherent meaning in a thread that shares its title with this article. (1) Before proceeding, I ...
MISUNDERSTANDING MEDIA: A BLURRY "VISION OF STUDENTS TODAY" (PART ONE)
Apr 01, 2008; ... THE IMAGERY IN A RECENT and very popular YouTube broadcast "A Vision of Students Today" exposes students in a college lecture hall seemingly living in a state of "all-at-oneness" with their media. Repetitive New Age marching music provides the soundtrack for a point-of-view camera that shakily ...
MISUNDERSTANDING MEDIA: A BLURRY "VISION OF STUDENTS TODAY" (PART TWO)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Faces blank and joyless, rows of university students sit in a large white lecture hall and hold up messages on notepaper or laptop screens; these remarks bemoan the impersonality, expense, and disconnectedness of their academics. Sterility and emptiness inform the YouTube images. Only close ups ...
GLOBAL WARMING AS A METAPHOR
Apr 01, 2008; ... I FIRST HEARD THE TERM "global warming" in the late 1970s. I heard it during some talks by nuclear scientists from Los Alamos, New Mexico. They claimed that the earth was wanning up, and it would be good to build more nuclear power plants since they would not contribute to global warming, the ...
The Assault on Reason
Apr 01, 2008; ... Al Gore. The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin, 2007. Al Gore, like Neil Postman, contends that the republic of letters (print media) has been invaded and occupied by the republic of television and the result has been a dumbing down of the news we get and a dumbing down of discourse ...
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
Apr 01, 2008; ... Judith Rich Harris. No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. New York: Norton, 2006. It was evolutionary psychologists who first proposed the idea that the mind is, as Stephen Pinker put in How the Mind Works, "not a single organ but a system of organs, which we can think of ...
The Middle Way: Finding Happiness in a World of Extremes
Apr 01, 2008; ... Lou Marinoff. The Middle Way: Finding Happiness in a World of Extremes. New York: Sterling, 2007. These days, our "global village" (a term coined by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s) is awash in either-or arguments, caused in large part by extremists of every kind, who are unwilling to ...
66 Years Ago, before ETC: Volume 1, Number 1
Apr 01, 2008; ... BERNARD CHALIP, HOW ET CETERA WAS NAMED PLANS FOR A GENERAL SEMANTICS SOCIETY were moving forward by January of 1942. Also envisioned was a general semantics journal. Alfred Korzybski asked Gordon McKnight to be editor, expecting him to produce at least a prospectus to be distributed at ...
65 Years Ago, ETC: Volume 1, Number 1
Apr 01, 2008; ... my sweet old etcetera aunt lucy during the recent war could and what is more did tell you just what everybody was fighting for, my sister isabel created hundreds (and hundreds) of socks not to mention shirts ...
Communication from Korzybski
Apr 01, 2008; ... Dear Hayakawa: We at the Institute are very happy that you have been selected as the editor of ETC. We hear that some of the readers like the title ETC. and that a few do not. Personally I feel that the publication of the Society could not have a better title. After all, our work is ...
36 Years Ago, in ETC: Volume 24, Number 4
Apr 01, 2008; ... DEBBIE, an earnest twelve-year-old, stands frustrated at the chalkboard after misspelling several words in spite of the teacher's exhortations to listen to the sounds. Louder, more meticulous enunciations neither lower the tension nor lessen the frustration. Self-reflexive awareness can break ...
DATES AND INDEXES
Apr 01, 2008; ... WE RECENTLY LEARNED of the death of Bernard Chalip, a noted voice instructor, teacher and author in the field of general semantics. Chalip died April 1, 2008 in Alameda, CA, at the age of 90. His singing students included noted performers of opera and other classical forms. A graduate of the ...