Professor Isabel Caro Gabalda of the University of Valencia in Spain has published El Uso del Leguaje en Psicoterpia Cognitiva (2014), a volume on cognitive psychology that is based on general semantics.

Professor Caro Gabalda dedicates the book to her former colleagues at the International Society for General Semantics and the Institute of General Semantics, specifically Sanford I. Berman, Mary Morain, Patricia G. Maynard, Robert U. Redpath, William Exton, Jr., and Charlotte Schuchardt-Read.

In the copy she sent to IGS, Professor Caro Gabalda penned on the flyleaf "To all my colleagues at the Institute of General Semantics for the support of my interest in general semantics." She has clearly turned that interest into an important book containing practical uses for GS.

You may purchase the book from the following link: http://www.edesclee.com/products.php/ISBN9788433027368

Volume 71, Number 1 (January 2014), of the Institute of General Semantics's quarterly journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics has been mailed and is now available for download from the IGS Store in searchable PDF format.

• Click here to download ETC 71:1 from the IGS Store.

Table of Contents Preview

• "The Cult/Ure of Personality" by Thom Gencarelli
• "A Time to Keep Silence, and a Time to Speak" by Michael Moore
• "Ten Common Blocks to Clear Thinking with General Semantics Correctives" by Martin H. Levinson
• "[P] etc." by Dominic Heffer
• "Ten Cautionary GS Lessons from World War I" by Martin H. Levinson
• "Indexing, Dating, Etc., in Higher Education" by Gary H. Mayer
• "Awareness and Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior (Part 4) -- Inference-Observation Confusion: Distinguishing between Observation and Inference)" by Mary P. Lahman
• "Perspective: Some Thoughts on Current and Future Directions for GS" by Martin H. Levinson
• Probes:
  "Aristotle's Fourfold Causality, Tetralemma, and Emergence" by Ben Zhang and Bill Guschwan
• From the Vault:
  "The Narrow-Gauge, Broad-Band Medium" by Ben Bakdikian
  "The Ambiguity of Perception" by Gary Gumpert
• "Wading in the Shadows" by Barry Liss
• "Et Cetera" by Catherine Zickgraf
• "Surroundings" by Ross Jackson
• Plus News and Notes.

Cover Art

The cover of ETC 71:1 is from a painting by Nicole Wilson titled The Dreamer.

• Click here to view more art by Nicole Wilson.

Volume 70, Number 4 (October 2013), of the Institute of General Semantics's quarterly journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics has been mailed and is now available for download from the IGS Store in searchable PDF format.

• Click here to download ETC 70:4 from the IGS Store.

Table of Contents Preview

• "Alethic Relativism and Faultless Disagreement: Weighing in on the Puzzle from a General Semantics Perspective" by John Engle
• "On the Benefits of Sticking to Certain Principles: A Response to Lloyd Moran's 'How Pseudo-Scientists Get Away with It'" by Tim Lyons
• "What Is Mathematics and Why Does It Matter" by Carmen M. Latterell and Janelle L. Wilson
• "The Largest Whale Penis in the Jungle and Other Big Things: Toward Simpler Messages" by Mark Hickson III
• "The Real Consequences of Imaginary Sex Acts" by Brent Lunceford
• "An Inconvenient Booth: Mistaking Symbol for Both Map and Territory" by Jan Lukas Buterman
• "Awareness and Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior (Part 3) -- Allness: Discovering It Is Not Possible to Know Everything about Anything" by Mary P. Lahman
• 75th Anniversary Reprint:
  "Laws of the Media" by Marshall McLuhan
  "Television: The New State Religion?" by George Gerbner
  "The Information Environment" by Neil Postman
• Plus Book Reviews and Dates and Indexes.

Cover Art

The cover of ETC 70:4 is from a painting by British artist Dominic Heffer titled "Painting etc. 2."

• Click here to view more art by Dominic Heffer.

Volume 70, Number 3 (July 2013), of the Institute of General Semantics's quarterly journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics has been mailed and is now available for download from the IGS Store in searchable PDF format.

• Click here to download ETC 70:3 from the IGS Store.

Table of Contents Preview

• "On Semantics and General Semantics: Re-Defining the Former to Understand the Latter" by Ben Hauck
• "The Science and Sanity of Listening" by Benjamin J. Cline
• "Awareness and Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior (Part 2) - Abstraction: Exploring Why the Map Is Not the Territory" by Mary P. Lahman
• "Loose Lips: Broadcast and Socially Mediated Political Rhetoric and the Sinking of the 2012 Senatorial Campaigns of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock" by Jefferson Spurlock
• "The Textbook Writer" by Joseph A. DeVito
• Metaphors in Action:
  "Reality Is Boring, Media Are Magnetic" by Raymond Gozzi, Jr.
• 75th Anniversary Reprint:
  "Remembering Don Hayakawa" by Alan R. Hayakawa
  "The Empty Eye" by S. I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa
  "Whatever I Call It, It Is" by Neil Postman
  "New Hope for the Technological Society: An Interview with Jacques Ellul" by Berta Sichel
  "Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work, by Jacques Ellul. Edited by William H. Vandenburg; translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: The Seabury Press, 1981" by Terrance P. Moran
  "Media Tribes: Making Sense of Popular Culture, the Mass Media, and Everyday Life in America" by Arthur Asa Berger
  "The Electronic Imagination: Requiem for a Narrative" by Brian Donahue
• "For the Nonce (Excerpt)" by Phillip Dow
• Plus Book Reviews and Dates and Indexes.

Cover Art

The cover of ETC 70:3 is from a painting titled "Earth" by Nicole Wilson.

• Click here to view more art by Nicole Wilson.

Volume 70, Number 2 (April 2013), of the Institute of General Semantics's quarterly journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics is arriving in the mail and is now available for download from the IGS Store in searchable PDF format.

• Click here to download ETC 70:2 from the IGS Store.

Table of Contents Preview

• "Midlevel Abstracting: An Underserved Zone of General Semantics" by Richard Fiordo
• "General Semantics: Understanding Korzybski's Formulations" by Mary P. Lahman
• "This Old Sole" by Michael Moore
• "General Semantics and Effective Communication" by Geetha Bhasker
• "How Just Is Our Justice System?" by Frank J. Scardilli
• "Diasporic Creativity as a Non-Aristotelian Form of Communication" by Deepa Mishra
• "A Glossary: Usage Abbreviations of Mobile Phone SMS" by Thotapally Anjaneyulu
• Metaphors in Action:
  "Watching Television Is Like ..." by Raymond Gozzi, Jr.
• Probes:
  "Food as a Social Medium and a Medium of Culture" by Peter Zhang
• 75th Anniversary Reprint:
  "The Brotherhood of Doctrines" by Alfred Korzybski
  "People in Quandaries: And Why They Are There" by Wendell Johnson
  "Semantics, General Semantics: An Attempt at Definition" by S. I. Hayakawa
  "etcetera" by e.e. cummings
• Poems:
  "I Know Not ..." by Shipra R. Upadhyay
  "She and He" by Darlyne Ibarra
  "Criss-cross" by Steven Jacobson
  "Homeward" by Steven Jacobson
  "The American Flag" by Danny P. Barbare
  "Janitor's Winter Poem" by Danny P. Barbare
  "Sustenance" by Jane Blanchard
  "Hold Out" by Jane Blanchard
  "Coupling" by Jane Blanchard
• Plus Book Reviews and News and Notes.

Cover Art

The cover of ETC 70:2 is from a painting titled "Mr. Neuro Semantic" by Dom Heffer.

• Click here to view more art by Dom Heffer.

The scope of the study and research of general semantics in India has been expanded through the opening of a Nodal Centre of Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics at Smt Chandibai Himathmal Mansukhani College, Mumbai.

The Centre was inaugurated on September 11, 2013, and it started functioning immediately thereafter. As a starting point, the Centre plans to institute certificate courses for both undergraduate and graduate students on various principles of general semantics.

In addition, the Centre shall conduct other academic programs from time to time on various aspects of general semantics.

• Click here to read the inauguration announcement for the Nodal Centre for General Semantics.

To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology, the original compendium of essays edited by D. David Bourland, Jr., and Paul Dennithorne Johnston on the form of English without "be verbs," is now available as a PDF ebook for download from the IGS Store.

About the Book

Examine the verbs of the "to be" family and you find a startling underlying assumption.  The words be, been, is, was, am, were, etc., have their logical basis in the idea that things stay the same.  The notion of identity -- a thing's absolute sameness with a similar thing or with itself over time -- has confused and corrupted thinking since the days of Aristotle.

Life means change: growth, learning, metamorphosis, decay.  Even the apparently changless earth changes, as moving plates push up mountains or split continents apart.  Today we often experience rapid social and technological change.  Yet our daily language has at its foundation the assumption that things don't change, an assumption that helps us focus and therefore "understand," but also leads us astray when we act as if things haven't changed, and they have.  How can we deal with this "two-edged sword" that both helps and hinders us in our daily lives?

E-Prime, a variant of English that eliminates the verbs of the "to be" family, makes us aware of the problem, and offers one solution.

Some of the benefits: lively, concise writing and speaking; clearer, more critical thinking; better communication, evaluation and decision-making.

Purchase the Book

• Click here to purchase To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology PDF Version in the IGS Store.

Mary P. Lahman, Ph.D., has recently created Awareness & Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior, a new ebook available for free download through the IGS Site.

UPDATE: Version 2 of this PDF has been uploaded to the IGS Store on September 7, 2013. Its cover is depicted here.

About the eBook

This 60-page PDF booklet aims at increasing awareness of faulty language behavior and motivating daily action to correct such behavior.

In the first two sections of the text, Dr. Lahman (Professor of Communication Studies at Manchester University) shows how general semantics can be used as a systematic inquiry into language behavior. In the remaining four sections, Dr. Lahman follows with an application of these formulations, including case studies.

• Click here to download Awareness & Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior in the IGS Store.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: General Semantics
Chapter 2: Abstraction
Chapter 3: Allness
Chapter 4: Inference-Observation Confusion
Chapter 5: Bypassing
Chapter 6: Differentiation Failures
Conclusion
References by Chapter
Glossary

About the Author

Mary P. Lahman, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication Studies at Manchester University.

Download the eBook

• Click here to download Awareness & Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior in the IGS Store.

The booklet is also redundantly available in the General Semantics Learning Center under Teaching Materials.

• Click here to visit the Teaching Materials section of the General Semantics Learning Center.

Communications: The Transfer of Meaning, Don Fabun's 1968 book that comes with an instructor's guide and teaches general semantics with vivid illustrations, is now available as a PDF ebook for download from the IGS Store.

About the Book

A creatively illustrated introduction to communication and produced by award-winning editor and author Don Fabun, its brevity makes it an excellent supplement to courses in speech, journalism, language arts, media literacy, etc.

The PDF version comes as a .zip file containing an ebook version suitable for reading on Kindle, Nook, etc., a wide-format version that displays the illustrations as intended to be viewed, and an instructor's guide.

Purchase the Book

• Click here to purchase Communications: The Transfer of Meaning PDF Version in the IGS Store.

At the 14th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, the Institute of General Semantics is sponsoring a panel presentation on teaching general semantics.

The session is titled “Teaching of General Semantics,” and it is scheduled for Thursday, June 20, 2013, at 2:15-3:30.  Panelist include Martin Levinson, Mary Lahman, and Corey Anton.

General Information

The Fourteenth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association
"Media Ecology Unplugged"
June 20–23, 2013
Grand Valley State University
Grand Rapids, Michigan
http://media-ecology.org/activities/index.html

IGS Panel

Moderator

Corey Anton, Grand Valley State University

Panel Presenters

Martin H. Levinson, Institute of General Semantics
Mary P. Lahman, Manchester University
Corey Anton, Grand Valley State University