Beyond E-Prime

By J.R. “Minja” Jaymz

E-Prime (E’): The English Language without the verb “to be”

imagine a world where maybelogic and e-prime becom the norm

imagine a world with the pope saying "maybe an ordained priest can turn
a piece of bread into the body  of a dead Jew but the priest needs a Willy
for the magick to work"

imagine Jerry Falwell bellowing "maybe Jesus hates gay people as
mch as i do"

imagine a rabbi chanting "Hear O Israel:the Lord God seems one, maybe"

imagine every tower in Islam resounding with "There
'is' no god except maybe Allah and maybe Mohammed 'is'
his prophet"

The world might go stark staring sane?

- RAW, Quantum Psychology MLA Course, 13 January 2005

January 2001.  I had just moved from Southern to Northern California and was working full time and and taking a semester off school.  I had also just discovered internet forums and spent several hours a day entertaining myself on Christianity Debate boards, using skills I had cultivated in my high school years as a nationally-ranked Lincoln/Douglas Debater to tear my opponents arguments apart by twisting language (definitions, labels, Aristotelian Logic) and often added insult to injury through subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ad hominem attacks.  I was such a troll – and I loved every minute of it. 

My English summer class professor turned out to be a brilliant woman who studied linguistics at UC Davis (when the student is ready, the teacher will come?), and she turned me on to Korzybski.  She also goes down in Minja History as the first English teacher to return papers to me full of red pen – always for “passive voice” and “using is too much”.  In September I read Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson, and discovered my Cosmic Trigger – E-Prime (E’).  I started using E’ as Bob suggested, and I experienced profound changes in my thinking, which affected my thought.  I noticed my satisfaction from debating decrease day by day.  I even reconciled with my very Christian sister who I had stopped talking to 7 years before.

I spent a long, long, long time promoting E-Prime (E’).  Every class presentation, every report, everywhere I posted online, I usually talked about E’ and debated why people should use it.  I wished everyone would just use it because using it myself showed me that a lot of the arguments I engaged in qualified as meaningless.  I also wished for it because I wanted people to quit trying to inflict their biases on me – it only seemed fair to me at the time, since I had stopped doing it to them.  It took a few years, and help from my friends at the MLA in the now-mythic E-Prime Argument to come face to face with my Cosmic Schmuckery – in taking the stance I did with E’ I was, in a sense, telling people what to do.  Then it hit me – adhering to anything all the time (even something as incredible to me as E’) sure sounds like a good definition for “belief,” as well.  Some saw me as preaching from an E’ pulpit, and I soon found I could see their perspective quite clearly.  I had turned E’ into a dogma, a belief, internally.  And somehow, I had become (in some sense) what I outwardly rejected the most.

The revelation stunned me.  Once I realized this, I stopped talking about E’.  I even stopped writing in E’.  But I didn’t stop noticing the proliferation of izes in the communication surrounding me everyday.  And I still felt like anyone and everyone could benefit from just trying E’ for 8 weeks.  But how do I go about promoting something and not sound like I’ve turned it into a dogma?  As usual, words from Papa Bob helped me understand more.

Brag/incitement:
Whether you like modern physics and Budddhism
or prefer to return to aristotetlian [faith-based] neurosemantics
after 8 weeks of e-prime
you will at least unnerstan' quantum/Buddhist perspective
and KNOW wot you've rejected

Consider it an exploration, like 8 weeks of Chinese ideogram

- RAW, Quantum Psychology MLA Course, January 13, 2005

And the next day-

<specifically regarding E-Prime>

when semantic experiments seem useful,

some will try them

some will only pretend to try them

& some will spend 8 weeks explaining logically why nobody shd. try them

- RAW, Quantum Psychology Maybe Logic Academy Course, January 14, 2005

I’m (mostly) done trying to convince people why I think they should try E’.  Who am I to try and tell another person what’s best for them?  And I also see a number of reasons why I’m into E’ as opposed to, say, conspiracy theories, and I’m reminded of how easily I can ridicule unfamiliar realitytunnels, even though mine seems equally absurd to someone on the other end.  Plus, as RAW did after a while, I now use E-Choice. 

But I’ll share, for those interested, some fun (to me, anyway) games and exercises I’ve thought up and tried during my years with E’.   (probably not all on my own – I could have very likely read these somewhere some time, or something like it, so any unacknowledged credit is merely an oversight on my part) .  I’ve listed a couple below.  I may write out more another time. 

Self-Self-Examination

Immediately upon waking every morning, spend 15-30 minutes freewriting.  Spend as little thought and energy as possible on this writing.  Think of it as giving a stage to your Prover (“What the Thinker Thinks, the Prover Proves”), or your subconscious mind, or whatever metaphor works for you.  Try to tap into the transparent thoughts that play a role in your actions and reactions to life.

Do this as many mornings as you can manage/remember/feel like for two weeks, refraining from reading any of your writing. 

After the two weeks are up, set aside a block of time to spend reading what you wrote.  Highlight or circle every is-statement (sentence that contains be), or write them on a separate sheet of paper for later study.  Notice reoccurring statements.   Consider why these izes reside in you.

See the fnords

Get a bunch of magazines from different perspectives on a topic, or any collection of essays, or find some academic articles on the internet and print them out.  I have used Tracy E. Ore’s The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality most recently and obtained entertaining results.  If you’re feeling especially lazy but still want to do this exercise, just grab anything – newspaper, magazine, whatever.  Just don’t grab any of RAW’s more recent books.

Other tools needed: a set of highlighers, or pens in different colors, or just a pencil

Read through an article (or 10 pages at a time, if a long book).  As you do, circle or highlight in one color every instance of be you notice.  Underline or highlight in another color those statements you find you either emphatically agree or disagree with.

Read through the article again, searching for all the izes you missed the first time around.  Black out the be and highlight the rest of the sentence.  Why didn’t you see it the first time?  Compare the missed izes and the easily noticed izes.  What differences can you find between the two groups of sentences?  Develop some theories for why you didn’t see some but saw others.

Notice the frequency of occurrence of be in the essays.  What does that say to you about the writer’s intent?  How much information did you receive from the essay?

Contemplate the word “fnord”.   I’ve quoted from Illuminatus! below.  Substitute “is” for “fnord” and see if it still has meaning to you.

I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords. This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically called) whenever encountering the word ``fnord.'' The second conditioned reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course, was to attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway. Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen melted, and I felt a genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their son hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security . . .

The Writer invites anyone who has a comment, question, or complaint to contact hir at minja23@gmail.com.