[cjc]

Robert Anton Wilson disliked the verb:

I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism" and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word "is."

http://rawilson.com/prethought.shtml

(Scroll down approximately 1/4 of the page for the entry titled "Schrödinger's Jew")

[metachor]

Before his death, Robert Anton Wilson taught several online courses at the Maybe Logic Academy (http://www.maybelogic.org), which he founded. A large component of these courses took place in online discussion forums, where RAW encouraged the participants to use e-prime for all discussion.

At least one of the courses also included readings from Alfred Korzybski and the General Semanticists, who played a large role in formulating the concept and practice of e-prime.

Korzybski wrote a fascinating book called Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. In this work, Korzybski postulates that the multi-millennium-old Aristotelian system of thinking contributes a form of "essentialism" to the underlying metaphysical assumptions of the Western linguistic and philosophic traditions ("things" having "is-ness").

Korzybski argues that these metaphysical assumptions appear "false-to-facts" with modern scientific understanding (i.e. an operational accounting inspired by biological and physical systems thinking). These assumptions introduce flawed and delusional reasoning when projected on to a linguistic domain, and their operation on a human social system over time results in the emergence of pathological behaviors in individuals' interactions.

Korzybski and others concluded that a step towards a more-sane system of thinking might result in part from making explicit the flawed metaphysical assumptions implicitly derived from Arestotelianism, and eleminating their behavioral manifestation in speech (i.e. as forms of the verb "to be").

Science and Sanity can be previewed online at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=KN5gvaDwrGcC&printsec=f...

Incidentally, the same RAW course which took readings from Korzybski also included James Joyce's Ulyesses as a primary text.