Having received a flood of positive responses to last week's issue on the "ladder of abstraction," I've decided to share another clarifying technique from General Semantics.
Things change, and people change. But words that identify them rarely change. For example, although Bill Johnson changes and becomes older, stronger, richer, he is still identified by the same label: Bill Johnson
General Semantics provides a simple method for this matter.
Obviously, everything is changing. Always. Tools are rusting, leaves are falling, people are maturing and aging. Loren today is not the same Loren he was last year, or the year before, and certainly not the Loren of decades ago.
When you post an ad to sell your used car, you identify it by year. You don't just offer a "Cadillac Escalante." You offer a "2004 Cadillac Escalante." Potential buyers know the difference.
The field of General Semantics offers a simple technique called "dating." That involves including at least the year of the person you're referring to. In writing, that would be with a subscript such as "Loren Ekroth 1959."
When speaking, make a slight change, like "Loren Ekroth in 1959." (He was then a private in the U.S. Army in Italy.) That's a different Loren than "Loren Ekroth in 1967," (when he was granted a Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication.)
Here is some related Greek wisdom shared by General Semantics expert Wendell Johnson
"Heraclitus, the Greek, cast a long shadow before him. He contended that one cannot step in the same river twice.
"The Greek was going beyond the assertion that no two things are exactly alike to the assertion that no one thing is ever twice the same, that reality is to be regarded as a process. And we might enlarge his contention by pointing out that one may not step in the same river twice, not only because the river flows and changes, but also because the one who steps into it changes too, and is never at any two moments identical."
If you want to be clear in what you mean, you can use this "dating" subscript. In ordinary conversation, you can say something like "the Sally I knew in 2005 became a quite different person in 2008
after she experienced the financial crash."
You can also do this for boats, houses, horses, food, and many other nouns. (You've noticed that the quart of milk you bought last week carried a "sell by" date, and many other products have phrases like "best if used by 8/13/2012.") When you add specifics, you gain clarity.
Until next week, Loren
