We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
- Alfred Korzybski

3 Questions: "What?"........."So what?"........."Now what?"
- Coro wisdom

"The world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them."
- Albert Einstein

"The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything."
- George Santayana

"If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a 10-foot chain."
- Adlai Stevenson

"Teaching and learning that lead to no significant change in behavior are practically worthless."
– Irving Lee

"Learning to un-learn to learn, for me, best describes the process of learning the discipline theoretically (verbally) and organismically."
– M. Kendig

"Learning is the gradual replacement of fantasy with fact."
- Gifford Pinchot

"The trouble with people is not so much with their ignorance as it is with their knowing so many things that are not so."
- William Alanson White

"You can't no more teach what you ain't learned than you can come from where you ain't been."
- Mark Twain

"A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it."
- Alfred Korzybski

"You can't step into the same river twice."
- Heraclitus

"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"Happiness is not something that happens….It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"We are always getting to live, but never living."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"God may forgive your sins. But your nervous system won't."
- Alfred Korzybski

"The self explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes an explorer of everything else."
- Elias Canetti

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
- Albert Einstein

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits."
- Mark Twain

"Time is but the stream I go fishing in."
- Henry David Thoreau

"It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and only lukewarm defenders among those who may do well under the new."
- Machiavelli

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw

"To progress, man must re-make himself, and he cannot re-make himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor."
- Alexis Carrel

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
- Elvis Costello

Institute of General Semantics

›

Words and What They Do To You:
Beginning Lessons in General Semantics for Junior and Senior High School

by Catherine Minteer
Click the cover to return to the beginning of the book.

WORDS

and What They Do To You

Beginning Lessons in General Semantics
for Junior and Senior High School

by CATHERINE MINTEER

Illustrations by Lucy Ozone

Institute of General Semantics
Fort Worth, Texas USA
© 1953, Row, Peterson and Company
© 1965, Catherine Minteer
Web Edition © 2001, 2004 Institute of General Semantics

Table of Contents

Editor's Note for the Web Edition

Front Matter

What We Observed in Teaching General Semantics

How the Lessons are Organized

Lessons

1. What do we study in General Semantics?
2. Why do we study language habits??
3. How human beings differ from animals
4. Words are not objects or feelings or events
5. Non-Allness — Many Details — Use of etc.
6. How we select details
7. Kinds of statements — Factual and Inferential
8. How we use this new learning
9. Projection
10. The many uses of a word
11. Seeing differences — use of the index
12. A world in process — things change — use of date
13. Words are like maps
14. Unqualified statements
15. Either-Or vs. Many Values
16. What are good questions??

Suggestions for Class Check Ups
Incidents for Discussion
Illustrative Readings:
   Louis Agassiz, Science Teacher, Nathaniel Shaler
   Everything Has A Name, Helen Keller
   The Blind Men and the Elephant, John Godfrey Saxe
   The Emperor's New Clothes, Hans Christian Andersen
Books Suggested for Further Reading

The endsheets of this little book were designed to stress the facts that we live in a constant crossfire of language and that words do something to us. By words we mean all forms of communication—words that reach us in conversations and speeches and classroom discussions, over the radio and television, through newspapers, magazines, and books, from billboards and from advertising on packages.

As indicated above, the program developed in this book is in the area of communication. It presents comprehensive, flexible plans for a course of sixteen lessons. Based on some of the principles of general semantics, the lessons deal with the relationship between language and thought, with the scientific use of language, and with some misuses of language. The course is designed to train pupils to detect and to deal with bias, prejudice, oversimplifications, and ambiguity in what they read and hear. The pupil is also trained to look to language for a clue to understanding himself, understanding his relationship to others, and understanding his environment. Human relations, science, and social science can be correlated subjects in this expanded program of language arts.

Experience shows that these lessons provide pupils with a new, strong motivation for careful listening, critical reading, accurate speaking, and effective writing.

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