Word: semanticists
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...prescientific past. All this leads to emotional disturbances and frustrations, known as semantic shock. Korzybski prescribed some mental tricks to guard against this disorder. Take, for instance, the old hit song: "Falling in love is wonderful, it's wonderful . . . in ev'ry way." A general semanticist following Korzybski's rules to the extreme would render the line thus: "Fallings in love3 are wonderful, they are wonderful [to me] in a great many ways...
WHEN I use a word," declared that famed semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, "it means just what I choose it to mean." He mitigated this tyrannical attitude by explaining that when he made a word do a lot of work, he always paid it extra. Spiro Agnew, who also has a highhanded way with words, owes a great deal of overtime pay to the phrase "radical liberal." As he employs the phrase, upon which he has turned his vigorous intervention in the current congressional campaign, radical liberal seems to be an elastic blanket covering a huge bed, strangely cohabited by "the northeastern...
During his seven months as acting president of San Francisco State College, doughty Samuel I. Hayakawa, 62, proved that an artful semanticist can become a national symbol of campus peace-at a price. In suppressing bloody disorders, Hayakawa both entranced millions of outsiders and embittered his faculty and students. Last week the result won him a dubious prize that he actively sought. By a vote of 16 to 2, the State College Board of Trustees, headed by Governor Ronald Reagan, elected Hayakawa permanent president of S.F. State-a move that almost guarantees more strife...
Under a soft, woolly tam-o'-shanter, San Francisco State College's stopgap president, S. I. Hayakawa, proved every whit as hardheaded as the cops in riot helmets whom he called to quell turmoil on his campus. Day after day, newspapers and TV showed the Japanese-American semanticist with his academic Bushido fully aroused. The result of all that public exposure, Pollster Mervin Field reported last week, is another instant political personality...
...Change. The semanticist's objection to the verb "to be" is based on certain philosophical convictions. One is a stern rejection of an axiom of classical logic, the principle of identity-that A is A, or a rose is a rose. In fact, argued Korzybski, the basic principle of life is not identity but, as the elliptical pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus put it, that all is change. Time and movement are inexorable, and in the fraction of a second that a rose is described it has already begun to alter...