In 1933, Alfred Korzybski published a book of 798 pages entitled Science and Sanity, setting forth a methodological system, both theoretical and practical, dealing with all of human life. As a ..."system builder," he had trouble finding a good name for his work. His favorite for a long time had been "science of man," but he settled upon "general semantics," in order to emphasize the evaluational aspect of his outlook. He was drawing upon the Greek verb "to mean," as used by Polish logicians, and he was not aware that this would confuse speakers of English, for whom the word semantics refers to the senses of words and their changes. Here, Read examines the effect of this outlook on attitudes toward language.
Read comments that Dr Probert has shown the interplay between the principles of language study and the components elements of everyday behavior. He infers that the reciprocal feedback between high ...generalizations and the details out of which they are derived allows one to test his own analyses.
A reprint of an article on the geolinguistics of verbal taboo by Read is presented. He draws upon material that contrasts the usage of a set of stigmatized words in England and America, which is ...specifically the geolinguistic aspect ... the study of regional differences in the feature of language.
While others would make structural changes on the syntactical level on the English languages such as altering the subject-predicate relationship, the simplest and most feasible method is revision by ...vocabulary selection. Here, Read proposes the English Minus Absolutisms, which might sanitize and improve one's use of English as a communicative vehicle and could well become an important directive for increasing rationability.
