Primal General Semantics

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The map can't even give you a hint of how a pine forest smells in spring, or how much effort or time it takes to climb up and down the mountains...Maps limit the imagination to flat surfaces and dry streams.

WHAT I FIND most interesting about the above quote, recently written by a student in a freshmen composition course, is that she wrote it without ever having experienced writings or discussions by general semanticists.

I like to bring general semantics into my English class every now and then. I also like to keep my students writing, which is how I came to write, "The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing" on my board. My plan was to use the quote as a …