Word: semanticists
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With Smith's departure, the problems at S.F. State shifted from black student demands to more fundamental questions of radical student power. Reagan quickly appointed S. I. Hayakawa to take Smith's place. Hayakawa, a semanticist who was well-respected in his field but virtually unknown in the outside world, made his position clear from the beginning. He would negotiate with the students, he said, and he would make concessions if they seemed appropriate. But above all, he would keep the college open. "We're not going to let this college be closed down by anybody," Hayakawa said. Reagan echoed...
...defended the disruption. "There are many whites who do not apply to blacks the same standard of morality and behavior they apply to whites," he said. "This is an attitude of moral conde scension that every self-respecting Negro has a right to resent-and does resent." As a semanticist, Hayakawa said, he wished to comment on "the intellectually slovenly habit, now popular among whites as well as blacks, of denouncing as racist those who oppose or are critical of any Negro tactic or demand...
Good questions, but the answers are hard to come by. Does the fault lie with strict parents or permissive teachers? Urban tensions or too much affluence? Last week Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa of San Francisco State College suggested that the answer to so much disaffection among the young is television. TV, said Hayakawa, addressing the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in his home town, is a "powerful sorcerer." It can bewitch children into becoming alienated and rebellious dropouts or even drug addicts. "Parents and relatives and teachers may talk to them, but the children find them sometimes censorious...
...Francisco State College's famed Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa has no illusions. When ETC., the quarterly review of the International Society for General Semantics, devoted a special issue to LSD and other psychedelic drugs, Editor Hayakawa chose a few acid words for acid heads. Wrote he: "Most people haven't learned to use the senses they possess. I not only hear music, I listen to it. I find the colors of the day such vivid experiences that I sometimes pound my steering wheel with excitement. And I say, why disorient your beautiful senses with drugs and poisons before...
Phrases such as "Peace in our time" and "Prosperity is just around the corner" invoke "word magic," as linguists call verbal formulas that promise to make dreams come true through sheer repetition. On the other hand, observes San Francisco State College's S. I. Hayakawa, a pioneering U.S. semanticist. "You don't move a mass society with a volume by Galbraith." Particularly in the U.S., as Cambridge Historian Denis Brogan has pointed out, "the evocative power of verbal symbols must not be despised, for these are and have been one of the chief means of uniting the United...