Do words have inherent meaning?

IN AUGUST 2007, PARTICIPANTS on the Institute of General Semantics Forum discussed the frequently quoted statement "words don't mean, people mean," and the question of whether or not words have inherent meaning in a thread that shares its title with this article. (1)

Before proceeding, I feel that it is necessary to lay out my understanding of the subject by giving definitions of the major words in the title.

word

a single unit of language that has meaning and can be spoken or written The word "environment" means different things to different people. She spoke so fast 1 couldn 't understand a word (= anything she said).

meaning

what something represents or expresses Do you know the meaning of this word? The word has several meanings.

inherent

exisiting as a natural or permanent quality of something or someone The drug has certain inherent side effects. (Cambridge Dictionary of American English)

These definitions represent the collective senses by which these terms are understood by a majority of American English speakers as corroborated in standard dictionaries. (2)

In addition to these dictionary definitions, Korzybski in Science & Sanity (hereinafter S&S), provided us with his 'definition' of 'meaning' for 'words': "... words represent abstractions of different order ..." (p.21).

Combining all of these definitions, I can provide an overall definition of the word 'word' which matches my understanding:

word: a single unit of language that represents abstractions of different order and can be spoken or written.

I will discuss the usage of 'inherent' added to this definition later.

In this paper, I am restricting the use of meaning of a word to one specific level of abstraction, namely, that which is made by a reader/hearer upon encountering that word each time as part of a message of larger, more specific context. (3)

My immediate response to the question asked as the subject of the discussion was a definite 'no'.

This passage by Milton Dawes in Time-Bindings expresses well part of my views on the subject.

1. Words, by themselves, do not have meanings. (The 'meanings' of words we read in a dictionary were assigned by lexicographers. And lexicographers depend on the meanings given to these words by other humans.)

2. If I accepted that words by themselves had meanings, I would be acting elementalistically; I would be identifying; and I would be evaluating 'allistically'.

'Meaning' involves speakers/writers, their intentions; words they use to represent their intentions; my interpretation of those words; and my responses (conscious and non-conscious, verbal and non-verbal) based on my interpretation.

Words do not mean ... Humans give meanings. We are usually unaware that we do--but if we are very attentive, we can catch ourselves in the process. (p.6)

This summarized some of my thoughts about the subject, but didn't cover all of them, and so, I decided to try to lay out completely the foundations of why I. believed as I do.

During the course of the discussion, people did appear to acknowledge that, as happens in so many of our disagreements, the individual, personal, different and multi-level evaluations of several of the significant terms, especially including 'inherent' itself, formed the root of the problem. Becoming consciously aware that this was occurring emphasizes the raison d' etre of general semantics. (4)

As one example, I evaluated that some of the participants in the Forum discussion seemed to hold that meanings, once they had been formulated and placed in a dictionary, exist independently of both the formulator and any possible reader and that this constituted the inherent meaning of the words. I have seen this same attitude among many people, sometimes expressed as; "That is the meaning of the word because that is what is written in the dictionary."

In another example, some others appeared to disagree because the definition of the word inherent they use is 'by nature or habit'. This particular definition was found in only a single, although major, dictionary [Merriam-Webster Online]. Accepting the 'by habit' portion for the definition eliminates the contradiction presented by the above definition of inherent, as permanent, (although the 'by nature' part still remains problematic).

The fact that this is the only instance out of all of the sources with this usage would tend to indicate either that a) it is a more recently formulated usage just beginning to emerge or, b) is based on a different selection of users, i.e. dialectical in some sense. The possibility exists, although it is unlikely due to its etymology, that it is an older usage exiting from today's common vocabulary.

The American Heritage Dictionary, in contrast, uses the words essential constituent or characteristic. This avoids the direct use of permanent, but implies it indirectly, to me at least.

I can only hope that what I present here will clarify the viewpoint which, it seems to me, to be the prevailing time-bound one.

Finally, at another point in the discussion, an important difference was noted by more than one participant between the statement "Words don't mean, people mean" and the question "do words have inherent meaning?" One post suggested that while we might have differing personal definitions for the word "inherent" in the latter statement, the question does not necessarily accurately interpret the original statement, and that our discussion of the statement might proceed more effectively without that added complication.

The remainder of this paper, therefore, will continue to use my paraphrases of the statistically more standard definitions.

My opposition to answering the question of the title of this paper with a 'yes' comes from a mixture of two basic understandings which I have learned both from my formal Linguistic education and from my more informal study of GS. One of these deals with how language is learned and the other with how dictionaries are created.

Language Learning

A child learns a language by being immersed in an ever expanding linguistic environment, family, friends, school mates, just to name a few in no particular order. In this environment, he or she is exposed to streams of utterances from which it is possible to abstract distinguishing segments and for which he or she learns to create associations for certain segments (symbols) or concatenation of symbols based on the contexts in which they all occur. At this most basic level, this implies that no person ever has identical associations with any given language usage, simply due to the fact no person has an identical linguistic environment with any other. It is true that many of the associations are similar enough to other people's association, given a similar enough context, that a formulation (5) using those symbols invokes, (usually), in the hearer/reader an association similar enough so that it is sufficient for some level of communication as the hearer's evaluation (6), and comes reasonably close to what was intended by the speaker. This process is especially enhanced in the early stages of learning by the fact that many of the words are associated extensionally with physical objects. (7) Such associations would represent more similar correspondences between different speakers than would those abstract words which can only be defined intensionally.

As a person grows, his linguistic environment can expand beyond strictly oral language to that of written language and to include words representing many more intensionally defined objects. In this environment, he either learns how to evaluate unfamiliar words through the other written or pictured contexts or by obtaining an intensional definition of the word from others or from a dictionary. Such words when commonly used are learned primarily through the context method as they occur often enough for the contexts to coalesce and provide some level of fairly clear evaluations. Intensional definitions allow the searcher to make an evaluation of the defined word within a generalized context.

I experienced an excellent example of this in a word which was created or coined from scratch as a fictional Martian word, but which can now be found in some English dictionaries. This word, grok, coined by speculative fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (8) in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land was used first without any explicit definition on page 22 of the expanded version of the book, and continued to be used very often without definition in varying contexts, throughout the rest of the book. It is not until page 253 is it finally given an intensional definition in the form of an English translation. Thus to a person reading the book for the first time, and unfamiliar with the word, all of his evaluation of the word would come from the various contexts only. The intensional definition, or more specifically, the translation given for it is to drink, but it is obvious from earlier usages that most of them are used in a metaphorical fashion, much as English 'I see' often means the same as 'I understand'. This translation turns out to be only one of a number of others which are mentioned but not specified. According to the fictional text this word was created in a totally non-English environment, (in fact non-human), and it is based on "pure Martian abstractions from half a million years of wildly alien culture, [and had] traveled so far from any human experience as to be utterly untranslatable." (p.22)

Today, one definition of the word has entered the English language for a minority of speakers and can be found in some dictionaries so that a person encountering the word outside of its original source can look it up.

From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Main Entry: grok

Pronunciation: 'grak (9)

Function: transitive verb 

Inflected Form(s): grokked; grok-king

Etymology: coined by Robert A. Heinlein died 1988 American author: to understand profoundly and intuitively

Considering my own evaluation of the word which I gained strictly through context, I agree with the given definition, but add that in my understanding, that definition just barely touches the surface of the many other evaluations given by the contexts.

The Construction and Use of Dictionaries

To help set the stage from a General Semantics, (hereinafter GS), perspective, I quote the following from Robert P. Pula:

Among Korzybski's most original formulations was the multiordinal character of many of the terms we most often use. He insisted that, with multiordinal terms, the 'meaning' is strictly a function of the order or level of abstraction at which the term is used and that its 'meaning' is so context-driven [italics mine] that it doesn't 'mean' anything definite until the context is specified or understood (p.xvi).

Dictionaries are created by lexicographers who collect numerous citations of usage of both written and spoken language, and abstracting from them, produce dictionary entries. For any given word, their job is to determine what the common characteristics of those citations are for that word, and then write down their formulation of that evaluation as to what that word represents. This presents two problems to the lexicographer.

The same word may occur in sufficiently different citations that establishing a single evaluation for the word is not possible and thus we have multiple evaluations for the same word. In addition the lexicographer is often forced to make a judgment as whether the citations represent a 'standard' usage or whether it represents some regional or individual 'dialectical' variation.

The result of this becomes one or more formulations of the evaluation that the lexicographer derives from the citations using a choice of other words. The formulations that I used in the opening paragraphs are based on many lexicographers' own individual evaluations that they have for all of the words, phrases, sentences which are contained in the citations. In other words, they create, and place in their dictionaries, one or more intensional definitions based on their common abstractions from the citations using their evaluation of a set of other words which are ultimately based on their own unique sets of undefined terms.

Furthermore, the reader of a dictionary definition uses his own undefined terms to evaluate what he understands from that definition.

This process produces a series of different levels of abstraction. Starting with the people who created the original citations used by the lexicographer we have formulations done at one level of abstraction based on the existing verbal levels of those individuals. The lexicographer creates another level of abstraction when he evaluates a meaning or meanings from the combined citations. His formulation of those evaluations which go into the dictionary may or may not create another higher level of abstraction from the already abstracted evaluations. When an individual uses any symbol whose source for that individual comes from a dictionary, he creates another higher level of abstraction. Further, when that individual uses that symbol at any given time, he creates yet another higher level based on the given context at that time.

Dictionaries do provide a useful service. As Dr. Ralph Kenyon pointed out during the Forum discussion, dictionary definitions do provide, (paraphrased), "formulations which remain Relatively Invariant Over an extended period of Time, (hereinafter RIOT), for most words". In conversations or discussions, a dictionary entry or entries can be 'pointed' to thus giving a broader common expression that the participants can evaluate. Even so, there is no guarantee that different participants will come to the same evaluation from the dictionary formulation, but there should at least be some degree of narrowing of any gap in evaluation between them. For this reason I provided, at the outset, dictionary definitions for the three important terms of this paper.

The negative of my assertion herein would be: "A word has an inherent meaning". To relate my combined definition based on those definitions and adding Korzybski's to them, and applying it to that negative assertion, we have:

Word: A single unit of language that expresses or represents abstractions of different order and can be spoken or written.

Meaning can be abstracted and formulated as the converse of word above: Abstractions of different order which are expressed or represented by a word.

Completing our negative assertion by inserting the definition of inherent: natural or permanent into these two definitions, we arrive at these complete formulations of word and meaning:

Word: A single unit of language that naturally or permanently expresses or represents abstractions of different order, and can be spoken or written.

Meaning: Abstractions of different order which are naturally or permanently represented or expressed by a word.

The implication which derives from either of these two is that a word always has the same meaning. From a GS perspective, this is both 'elementalistic' by separating the user from the use of language and 'allistic' thinking by asserting not only that every use of a word is identical with every other use, but also implying that all words have such inherent meanings. In addition, the acceptance, at least by some of the participants on the Forum, of the term RIOT implies that meanings for words change over periods of time, in other words, they are not natural or permanent.

From a linguistics perspective, RIOT as applied to words can be easily proved by examining either the historical etymology of the definition of words or their regional or individual dialectical variations.

Linguistics and Meaning

Long before I was able to make a serious study of GS, I studied for an advanced degree in linguistics in which I followed the structuralist approach made rigorous by Bloomfield in his book Language. As part of my education I learned that "Every utterance of a speech-form involves a minute semantic innovation." (p.407) Allen Walker Read, noted lexicographer and general semanticist paraphrased this to say that "No word ever has the same meaning twice." (p.16)

It would be tempting to say that the quote from Bloomfield above corresponds closely to part of the GS approach to meaning as I have learned it and as emphasized here by Read. However, this would be somewhat misleading.

As outlined in his book, Bloomfield's entire orientation toward the study of languages takes a very narrow and limited attitude with respect to meaning.

Bloomfield's use of the term was based strictly on the analysis of the result of the chain [speaker's situation [right arrow] speech [right arrow] hearer's response]. (p.139) To simplify his methods of analysis, he focused his attention on this use of meaning to the 'hearer's response' rather than on the 'speaker's situation'. In other words, meaning is equivalent to the 'hearer's response'.

Bloomfield was attempting to make linguistics a rigorous scientifically based field of study by developing methods necessary to create taxonomies of speech forms by analyzing similarities and differences in speech forms much in the same way as sciences such as biology classified their objects by their similarities and differences. He was interested in classifying the audible portions of spoken speech and the visible portions of written speech in order to segment those items into parts that presented elements of distinguishable significance. In other words, to find those parts which when changed produced a different response (meaning). Thus it was not actually necessary to determine what a specific speech form meant, but only to determine if a given speech form produced the same response/meaning or a different one. Basically a question that could be answered by interrogating a speaker with the question Same? or Different? for various similar and slightly modified speech forms and trying to find the minimal changes.

In some ways Bloomfield came very close to Korzybski's thinking, but never quite made the complete connection. Kalin R. Harvey in his undergraduate thesis characterized Bloomfield's approach as follows:

His version of 'mechanism' did not allow him to deal with meanings as something that could affect human evaluation and action. (p.56)

However, in his chapter on Meaning, Bloomfield said:

  The situations which prompt people to utter speech, include every
  object and happening in their universe. In order to give a
  scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form of
  a language, we should have to have a scientifically accurate
  knowledge of everything in the speakers' world. The actual extent
  of human knowledge is very small, compared to this. We can define
  the meaning of a speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do
  with some matter of which we possess scientific knowledge. We can
  define the names of minerals, for example, in terms of chemistry and
  mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary meaning of the English
  word salt is 'sodium chloride (NaCl),' and we can define the names
  of plants or animals by means of the technical terms of botany or
  zoology, but we have no precise way of defining words like love or
  hate, which concern situations that have not been accurately
  classified--and these latter are in the great majority
  [italics mine]. (p. 139)

Reading this through up until the second part of the last sentence, one would probably agree with Harvey's conclusion. However, the last part of the last sentence provides examples of words which Bloomfield knew could not be analyzed in such a mechanistic fashion. Moreover, he also said in this regard:

  Even if we had an accurate definition of the meaning that is
  attached to every one of the forms of a language, we should still
  face a difficulty of another sort. A very important part of every
  situation is the state of the speaker's body. This includes, of
  course, the predisposition of his nervous system, which results
  from all of his experiences, linguistic and other, up to this very
  moment--not to speak of hereditary and pre-natal factors. If we
  could keep an external situation ideally uniform, and put different
  speakers into it, we should still be unable to measure the equipment
  each speaker brought with him, and unable, therefore, to predict
  what speech-forms he would utter, or, for that matter, whether
  he would utter any speech at all. (p. 141)

It is somewhat surprising in view of his correlation of meaning with 'hearer's response', that he makes this comment based on the 'speaker's situation', but it is obvious from this that Bloomfield recognized the 'inside-our-skin' aspects of the speaker's and hearer's worlds, but he failed to make the connection that all understanding of the 'outside-world' as he defined it above exists only in the abstractions that the speaker (or hearer) makes.

Given his goals with respect to linguistics, I don't think that it would have changed them to any significant degree if he had made the connection or had even been familiar with Korzybski's work. However, I believe, and it is speculative, that had Bloomfield been aware of GS, he could have expanded his chapter on meaning by framing it from a GS perspective. The results of that, I believe, if attributed to Korzybski, would have been extremely useful in helping the spread of GS thinking among succeeding generations of linguists rather than having it totally ignored by them to this day. It is speculative even more so to try to think how Korzybski might have been influenced had he known of Bloomfield's work.

Bloomfield's approach to language analysis was essentially bottom-up, starting with the phonological aspects and then to the morphological level, i.e. the level of syntactically derived units of meaning as described in the following paragraph. Only after this was completed could the linguist turn to the aspect of learning something about the meanings of units.

It is important to know that Bloomfield did ascribe specific meanings to certain classes of words or rather speech-forms. Here I am speaking of syntactically derived meaning or function. He defined specific classes of what he called morphemes some of which in general changed meanings of other words in certain specific ways. One English example would be the \s\or\es\ suffix morpheme used to create the plural forms of words. Note that one does not need to know the meaning of a term or for that matter that it has a meaning at all. It is simply sufficient to know that adding the suffix makes the term refer to plural instances of whatever meaning it has. (For example, the English plural of momrath is momraths). Another example would be the \il\ prefix, (derived in English from Latin), which produces the opposite meaning of words. (10) (11) This latter prefix takes several different phonetic representations depending on the phonetic makeup of the word to which it is attached. Examples would be (ir)reverent, (il)logical, (in)compatible. Note that this particular morpheme has only limited application and is not as widespread as is the plural morpheme. Other, purely syntactic words exist with different meanings or functions such as a, the, and, and so on. The meanings of such words are determined by their syntactic functioning in larger groups or sentences. (12) In any language, however, there are always exceptions to general rules that can be found. These are typically called 'irregular' as they do not follow the more general rules. Common examples are irregular (not regular) verbs such as 'to be' [right arrow] 'I am', 'he/she is', 'we are', etc., and nouns with irregular plurals, e.g. mouse [right arrow] mice.

GS and Meaning

GS is based on the view that what we can know of the world is derived from abstracting through a series of levels those perceived characteristics at each level and progressing from the 'outside world' to the 'inside-our-skin' non-verbal level to the verbal levels. It is a stated view of GS that a construct at each level of abstracting contains some but not all of the abstractions from the previous levels. Also, rejecting the Aristotelian Law of Identity by claiming that nothing is ever identical even with itself, implies that each event of abstracting can never be identical to another such event even within the same individual due to the fact that every event occurs in a unique space-time and in different overall contexts, both 'inside-our-skin' and 'outside'. This presents us with the GS derived approach to the meaning of words and other symbols fully compatible with the definitions I gave for word and meaning, which I laid out earlier, and which corresponds only partially with Bloomfield's, but doesn't contradict it. However, that aspect was totally downplayed in Bloomfield's actual work and teachings.

Summary

As a final conclusion of all of this, both my understanding of GS and that of the field of Bloomfieldian linguistics lead me to the same conclusion that was summarized in Dawes' statement that, "Words, by themselves, do not have meanings." And in particular, even when meanings are associated with words by the users, they don't have inherent meanings.

This viewpoint is also supported by pointing to some 'common dictionary definitions' for the important terms themselves within the theme of the paper.

Notes

1. The entire discussion may be found at http://www.learn-gs.org/cgi-bin/boards/ show.cgi?64/1105

2. Over 20 dictionaries were consulted. My definitions represent the common distillation of the meanings given in those sources.

3. The level of abstraction presented in a dictionary definition raises certain problems. The meaning for the word is actually equated to the abstractions of the string of words which make up the definition. This means that if a person is using the dictionary to look up the meaning, then the level of abstraction is actually given by the definition and not the word itself. A person who already knows the word will either confirm the abstractions equated to by the definition, will modify the abstractions which he already has for the word, or will reject the abstractions of the definitions and keep what he already has.

4. In a later part of the discussion, as a specific example of one of the terms causing problems, one participant, Dr. Ralph Kenyon, agreed with my assertion that he was using the term "dictionary definitions" to refer to "commonly agreed-upon usages" and not specifically to "physically written definitions in a physical dictionary." This definition is contrary to my own and contributes to the statement referenced by this note. In fairness to Dr. Kenyon, even though he uses the word inherent in some of his posts, I would have to grant that the RIOT characterization, which he introduced into the discussion, argues against the inclusion of permanent in his definition of meaning.

During the discussion my use of the words "marks on paper" in reference to words in a dictionary was intended to show that, indeed, the word being defined, in the case of someone who doesn't already have some associations for that word, is nothing but "marks on paper' until that person evaluates the combination of words making up the definition and links that evaluation to the actual word. Furthermore, that can only happen when that person already has associations for the individual words in the definition and for the concatenation of those words as a whole.

Interestingly, the term "time-binding", essential to any discussion of GS, was found in only two online dictionaries and one of those was a direct quote from the other.

5. The word 'formulation' is used throughout this paper to represent any written or spoken production of a symbol or concatenation of symbols of a language which represents an intended evaluation of the speaker/writer.

6. The term 'evaluation' is intended as a non-elementalistic substitute to replace the 'elementalistic' term 'meaning' whenever I am speaking from my personal understanding since in my view we cannot separate the language user from the language.

7. Recent studies by cognitive linguists such as Lakoff and Johnson have shown that much of the evaluations of our basic vocabulary is derived from aspects of our physical bodies and that these basic symbols are then often used as metaphors for more abstract evaluations. Within my current understanding of these findings and my studies of GS, I don't believe at this time that this contradicts any of the fundamental premises or teachings of GS. The list of words in a paper, (See: "Most Ambiguous Words" in References), deals with the words with the most evaluations in English, called senses in that paper. This list would seem to me to support L&J's conclusions.

8 Heinlein himself was a member of the Institute of General Semantics and attended two of Korzybski's seminars in 1939 and 1940 as well as possibly three local ones. Most of his works contain references to GS. Stranger in a Strange Land itself has over 80 such references. My selection of 30 of these totals some 5057 words. The number of references in his entire canon totals over 47637 words (See reference for my book Heinlein and Korzybski).

In an article written by Bill Patterson, "A Study of Misfit", about one of Heinlein's early stories, made me aware that Heinlein not only put direct and indirect references to GS in his works, but that he actually used principles of GS as underpinning for this work and possibly others.

9 The word appears in over 10 standard dictionaries, and 9 other specialized ones.

I am the only person I know who pronounces this word to rhyme with broke rather than with clock as indicated by the phonetic description in the definition. I am not sure why this is true as the spelling of the word, if used in normal English, would indeed be as the majority of people would use it. I can only speculate that I always assumed my pronunciation because it was a Martian word, not an English one, and therefore would not follow English rules.

(10) One might think that based on this particular morpheme, we might evaluate the word inflammable as not burnable, and in fact, many people did so evaluate it. It turns out that this particular morpheme derives from another source, evaluated as to cause, so that we actually evaluate inflammable as able to be made to burn. Labels based on the misevaluation actually have been the source of a number of accidents involving so-called inflammable materials. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a fire investigator, discovered this and was instrumental in having the terminology changed so that today we see the label flammable on such materials. Whorf in addition to his regular profession studied under the noted linguist Sapir and studied and wrote a number of articles on the structures of various languages. Whorf was contemporary with Korzybski, but he and Korzybski were unknown to each other. Whorf came independently to many of the same conclusions as did Korzybski on the effect that language structure has on how we perceive the world. His works were collected and published posthumously. Neither Korzybski nor Whorf were considered to have any standing by regular linguists, Korzybski even less so than Whorf. This was in part due to the fact that both were mainly educated outside of the academic linguistic fields. (See Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality in References).

11 In addition to this particular Latin-derived morpheme, a more common one derived from the Germanic roots of English is \un\, in words such as (un)common, (un)likely, (un)usual etc., This accounts for the use of 'unalienable' rights in the Declaration of Independence, taken from English Common Law versus today's more common 'inalienable'.

12 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

The gostak is a meaningless noun that is used in the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes", an example of how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown. This can be seen in the following dialogue:

Q: What is the gostak?

A: The gostak is that which distims the doshes.

Q: What's distimming?

A: Distimming is that which the gostak does to the doshes.

Q: Okay, but what are doshes?

A: The doshes are what the gostak distims.

In this case, it is possible to describe the relationships between the terms in the sentence--that the gostak is that which distims the doshes, that distimming is what the gostak does to the doshes, and so on-even though there is no fact of the matter about what a gostak or doshes actually are.

The phrase was coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham but is best known through its quotation in 1923 by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning (p. 46). Ogden and Richards refer to Ingraham as an "able but little known writer".

References

(1.) Author Unknown, "Most Ambiguous Words". This paper was found on the internet in 2005, but I can no longer find any trace of it. According to the contact whose address was listed in the paper, it most likely originally appeared on a website called http://rec-puzzles.org. Entries on this site were given without any author information or copyright specifications. I have therefore placed a copy of it on my own website to make it available to readers of my paper. http://home.alltel.net/dwrighsr/Ambiguos Words. pdf

(2.) Leonard Bloomfield (1933), Language, New York: Henry Holt

(3.) Cambridge Dictionary of American English, online at http://dictionary. cambridge.org.

(4.) Milton Dawes (2003), "Time-Bindings" Vol. XXI, No. 3, Institute of General Semantics.

(5.) Kalin R. Harvey (1998), "Bloomfield, Korzybski, And The Meaning of Language Science: A Tale Of Two Scholars", Undergraduate Thesis, University of Alberta.

(6.) Robert A. Heinlein (1991), Stranger in a Strange Land, The Uncut Version. Ace Books.

(7.) Ingraham, Andrew (1903), Swain School Lectures, pp 121-182.

(8.) Alfred Korzybski (1994), Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Fifth Edition, Institute of General Semantics, originally published in 1933.

(9.) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, N.Y.

(10.) Merriam-Webster Dictionary, online at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary.

(11.) Patterson, Bill (1998), "A Study of 'Misfit'", Issue No. 3, The Heinlein Journal, July,.

(12.) Robert P. Pula (1994), "Preface to the Fifth Edition," Science & Sanity, Fifth Edition, The Institute of General Semantics, Brooklyn, N.Y.

(13.) Allen Walker Read (1983), "The Semiotic Aspect of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics", ETC, Volume 40, Number 1.

(14.) Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John Carroll. MIT Press.

(15.) Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gostak, 11/08/2007.

(16.) David E. Wright Sr. (forthcoming), Heinlein and Korzybski: Maps of General Semantics.

DAVID E. WRIGHT SR.*

* David E. Wright Sr. has a BA in German, MA in Linguistics, and an MS in Computer Science. He is now retired and devotes his time to studying and writing. He currently is serving on the Board of Directors of The Heinlein Society. He has published several articles in The Heinlein Journal. An article on Heinlein & Korzybski was reprinted in the October 2007 issue of ETC. He lives in NW Georgia with his wife of 41 years, Jennelou.