Give Up Six Words and Change Your LifeAlfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, o

Give Up Six Words and Change Your Life

Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, observed that how we talk affects how we handle problems and how we behave. He found that scientists, trained to be specific, handled both personal and laboratory problems better than non-scientists. Non-scientists, then as now, used words loaded with feeling and prejudgment and got into trouble.

Changing the way we use certain everyday words can actually shift the way we see the world and other people, helps change the emotion-laden attitudes behind the words, and makes us less likely to make inappropriate demands on ourselves and others.

There is also a change in the effect on others. Teachers, told that certain students have hidden talents, will help them develop, even if the students were selected blindly by researchers. People act as they think they have been defined, and like it or not, our words play a large part in expressing that definition.

In our work, we have found six words that are often used in damaging ways: try, always, is, can't, should and everybody. These words are really "families" of words. Always can be expanded to never, every time. Should is also ought to, must, have to. We use nobody, no one, all, 'the way we use everybody.

Each of these words is linked to the concept of time. "Everybody does it" implies every person always does it. Should reflects a standard adopted in the past, governing how we must always behave. Is implies a permanent characteristic of something or someone, as "she is impossible to deal with." Alfred Korzybski called humans "time binders". Facts, opinions and behaviors are learned, repeated and passed on, even though they may not necessarily have been true in the first place. Both Korzybski and S. I. Hayakawa, who is a respected semanticist, caution us against using such "allness" terms.

Yet we do use them, as though by doing so we could somehow manage the present and future. "With words," says Hayakawa in Language in Thought and Action, "we influence and to an enormous extent control." "I'll meet you at three Thursday" is an attempt to make another person--and ourselves --be at a certain place at a certain time. Hayakawa writes, "The future is a specifically human dimension. To a dog, 'hamburger tomorrow' is meaningless. With words we [humans] impose a certain predictability upon future events."

Similarly, we attempt to control people's actions and even characteristics with can't, should, everybody and related words. We try thus to create "reliable" data, however unrelated it is to the facts.

According to Freud, to some mental patients certain words become magical, symbols of whole trains of thought condensed. Seriously ill neurotics maintain some of that magic: "Everybody's against me" or "I have to do this." And nearly all of us have the same bad habit to a less intense degree.

When and where do we begin this pattern of restrictive words and beliefs？

According to the late speech expert Wendell Johnson, as adults we are still "using information, attitudes, beliefs, procedures, practices ... adapted to an earlier time." Our beliefs, and the words we use to support them and to protect ourselves from change, come from early in our lives. Willis Harman, Ph. D., a futurist at SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute), maintains that we are all in a way hypnotized from infancy. "We do not perceive ourselves and the world about us as they are, but as we have been persuaded to perceive them," says Dr. Harman. Research shows that objects and people with some familiar characteristics tend to be perceived by the infant as identical. The newborn cannot distinguish between self and surrounding. When the baby is hungry, everybody is hungry. Later, any man becomes "Daddy" and every animal "doggie."

We use such early biases to m

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