Sam Bois, a clinical psychologist and management consultant from Montreal, attended his first seminar with Korzybski in 1945. He extended the work of general semantics in two major books, Explorations in Awareness and The Art of Awareness, introducing such notions as his "semantic transactor" model and the term "What Is Going On" (WIGO) to refer to the event level of the parabola in Korzybski's Structural Differential. The following summary of Bois' opening lecture at the 1950 summer seminar-workshop was written by Dick Brenneman, a student.

Relax … enjoy yourself … please, for the time, forget all of your personal problems and those tremendous world problems - forget those, too. It is impossible to absorb the methodology of General Semantics if you are tense and pre-occupied with all the interminable woes of the universe.

If I see any of you reflecting the tenseness of survival problems, I will refuse to talk to you. I will say, 'Go see the expert Charlotte [Schuchardt] and relax.' After all, life's not so bad - for heaven's sake, enjoy it.

There is an old Aristotelian, traditional aesthetic view that for anything to be beneficial, it must be hard. I say, 'poof' - just wait and see.

Well, what is this G.S.? What was this guy Korzybski talking about anyway, eh? What sort of double-talk did he throw at us - whatever you say it is, it isn't! Where the devil did he get this name General Semantics?

First of all, we will not quibble about words! I will not stand for that. You must remember that Sam Bois has already stood under one inquisition. He knows how insane it is to quibble over words. AK told us one thing if he told us nothing else - 'The words are not the things.'

It is our function as time-binders to improve science and civilization. If we think verbally we project the structure of our language on such phenomena as we observe and so are in a rut. How and where do we start to get out of this rut? Right at home. Don't wait for a dramatic opportunity to practice G.S. on the floor of the United Nations. Practice it in the prison cell, if necessary. We can and we must practice and create better methods of cooperation in whatever human group we join. So remember this, that family life is the most effective bio-cultural and bio-social training laboratory that we have available to us.