Word: chases
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Wharton School of Finance's Dean Joseph H. Willits, TIME'S Editor Henry R. Luce, Emporia Gazette's Editor William Allen White, Fordham's President Robert I. Gannon, former U. S. Minister to Denmark Ruth Bryan Rohde, New York University's Chancellor Harry W. Chase...
...prove his claim, Stuart Chase gives a digest of semantic authorities and then shows how meaningless in the light of their studies are some passages from 'such pundits as Plato, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, President Roosevelt, Walter Lippmann, Henry Ford. He even damns an excerpt from his own writings. As his only ''operational test" he asked 100 people, ranging from schoolboys to Senators, what "fascism" meant to them. They all disliked it, but they had 15 different concepts of what they disliked, including that of a housewife who thought it was "a Florida rattlesnake." Popular ideas...
Main source of this confusion, says Chase, comes from the "semantic illiteracy" of using such words as though they had an actual point of reference in the physical world, whereas in fact they are in the same category as the "souls" which savages give to trees, rivers and the like. And since language is the main instrument in regulating social relationships, the result of this word-witchery is to make men's actions also meaningless. Instead of giving souls to trees, modern man, avers Chase, personifies "national honor," "neutrality," "capital," "labor," "corporations." "It would surely be a rollicking sight...
...attack on loose thinking parading as profundity, on hollow rhetoric offered as a guide to social action, on fakes, phonies, pomposities, stuffed shirts, pedants and wordmongers in general, The Tyranny of Words will to most readers make tonic good sense. But, as with most of Stuart Chase's writing, they are likely to be more impressed with his devastating diagnosis than with his cureall. Picturing present-day human communications as a telephone switchboard with all the wires crossed, Stuart Chase can only look hopefully toward a distant future when, through the rigorous application of semantics, the connection between minds...
...present, he offers only such concrete examples as how semantics enabled him to cure himself of a fear of "snakes," such hypothetical examples as how it might keep a man from committing suicide. In the mind of the would-be suicide, suggests Chase, would occur a semantic Stop-Look-Listen! monolog like this: "This is bad; this is painful, depressing, almost intolerable. But my life, my organism, is a process, always changing ... no two contexts are tho same. . . . Snap out of it, brother, snap out of it! Prepare for the next context...