A FORK IN A ROAD

The Trivia Question That Changed My Life

When a trivia question resulted in anything but trivial consequences

The author (L top), FRED (couple in front) and Mike (R) during a break in the trivia game. Note the bottom-center antenna of the ever-present trivia game console. Credit: author scanned photo.

Mike, a college buddy, introduced me to Humperdink’s and the NTN-branded trivia game in 1993. (Humperdink’s also makes an appearance in my previous Banger Singles ‘Tweener’ Party story.)

Typically, Mike and I would compete against “FRED,” the handle that Jerry and his wife used to play the satellite trivia game.

On the night of The Question, Mike, an airline pilot, was on a trip. Rather than take on the FRED power duo by myself, we agreed to play together in hopes of achieving a perfect score — fifteen questions worth 1,000 points each. To earn the full thousand points, you had to answer correctly within the first five seconds. The point values decreased to zero over twenty seconds. A perfect game was 15,000 points.

The Question

Q: Alfred Korzybski is associated with which field of study? (1,000 points) Credit: author-created graphic.

I had to wait for the possible answers to fill the TV screen before I confidently turned to Jerry, operating the game box, and blurted out, “I know that. It’s B., general semantics.”

Jerry immediately touched the B key on the disorienting non-QWERTY keyboard. After twenty seconds, the screen displayed the correct answer as, indeed B. general semantics.

Jerry turned to me with a quizzical look and asked how I knew that answer. I explained that I had come across general semantics in a graduate-level linguistics course back in 1979, fourteen years earlier.

The look on his face suggested that he knew the answer as well. I asked him the same question.

He replied that he was taking a masters degree in general semantics in the early 1970s at the University of Nebraska, before he was dismissed for something having to do with pot. He later attended a seminar that the Institute of General Semantics (IGS, based in New Jersey at the time) had hosted. I tried to summarize what it was that had so interested me about the subject. My memory of the book, however, wasn’t as clear as I wished. But I remembered the name.

Nevertheless, when I arrived the next night, Jerry waved me over to their table and handed me a grocery bag. In it were two books he had kept from his general semantics course work. He told me to read them at my leisure, he wasn’t in a hurry to get them back.

The first three books that started my general semantics journey: Language in Thought and Action (Hayakawa), read in 1979; The Art of Awareness (Bois), read in 1993; and Science and Sanity (Korzybski), eventually completed in 1996. Scanned copies of the author’s books.

Two months later, he and his wife gave me a gift subscription to ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, the quarterly journal published since 1943.

As I eagerly read Bois’ The Art of Awareness and waited for my first copy of the journal to arrive, I could not have imagined the impact this happenstance encounter, due solely to a trivia question, would have on the rest of my life.

L–R: 1st issue of ETC.; March 1968 issue; December 2004 special issue “General Semantics Across the Curriculum”; January 2006 issue. Credit: author-created graphic. See additional credits below. Used with permission of the Institute of General Semantics.

How General Semantics Shaped the Trajectory of My Life

• Within a year of that trivia question, I had attended the first of three IGS seminars and submitted the first of twenty-one journal articles that would be published from 1995 through 2007.
• I was invited to join the Institute’s Board of Trustees in 1996 and joined the teaching staff from 1996 through 2006.
• From 2001 to 2003, I worked part-time for the Institute after the untimely death of the executive director, a good friend, in late 2000. During this period I spent time in the New York/New Jersey area to organize and catalog the Institute’s archives, which consisted of about a thousand books and three dozen 4-drawer file cabinets stuffed with documents and correspondence dating back to the 1920s.
• Because I had demonstrated to the board the value of the archives, they accepted a proposal to move the archival materials from storage in New Jersey to an office suite I rented near downtown Fort Worth, Texas.
• In June 2003, at the first board meeting in Fort Worth, the trustees voted to move the IGS administrative office to Fort Worth. They also moved forward on a proposal to merge the Institute, founded in 1938 by Korzybski, with the financially-struggling International Society for General Semantics founded in 1942.

Credit: author’s photos

• Once established in Fort Worth, the Institute received some much-needed publicity. Within a year, the Institute was profiled in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Dallas Business Journal reported on the new office in 2003 and the Dallas Morning News interviewed me for the back page of their Sunday supplement in 2006.
• Circumstances eventually resulted in my becoming the Institute’s full-time executive director from 2004–2007. Thanks to a large bequest to the Institute, the board was able to purchase an old A&P grocery store building and renovate it specifically for the Institute’s needs.

The before and after photos of the old A&P corner grocery store on the southside of Fort Worth that was transformed into Read House, the Institute’s new home. Credit: author’s photos

• From 2005 through 2008, I taught a course in general semantics for the Schieffer School of Journalism at TCU (Texas Christian University). The Institute’s new home, christened “Read House” in honor of a bequest from Allen and Charlotte Read, was conveniently located just two miles from TCU.
• In November 2007, the Institute’s President and I were honored to accept an invitation from a beneficent member in Mumbai, India, to travel to India. Over a three-week period we gave presentations to several universities in the area, including Ahmedabad, home to Gandhi’s ashram. The centerpiece of the visit was a three-day seminar for the Twelfth National Workshop by the Centre for Contemporary Theory in Baroda.

Celebrating Diwali 2007 in Mumbai with my colleague Andre and our host and benefactor, the late Balvant K. Parekh, founder of Pidilite Industries, and his wife. Credit: author photo

The End of that Trajectory

Shortly after returning from India, the Institute of General Semantics received a proposal from TCU’s College of Communication to, in simple terms, integrate the nonprofit Institute under the umbrella of the college. There would still be a board of trustees, but the college proposed to have a majority of the board seats. I knew in advance this was coming as I had been in preliminary “feeling out” discussions for awhile, informing the board as they occurred. However, no specifics had been divulged until the proposal.

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The internal debate on the matter resulted in personal acrimony, emotional accusations, and divisions among the trustees. Several of the senior trustees in the New York area had not strenuously objected four years earlier when the relocation to Fort Worth was on the table. But the proposal from TCU constituted an unpalatable consideration for them.

The vote itself lacked suspense. The handful of the trustees in the minority, including the President, and I resigned.

Rather than replace the salaried executive director position, the board decided that the new president would fill those responsibilities (perhaps with a stipend).

I stayed in Fort Worth to teach my TCU classes in 2008. I understand the Institute eventually sold Read House and allowed a few individuals to go through and take most of the books in the library and the archived files. The rest was disposed of, leaving not much physical material to return to New York.

After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2009, I compiled and organized the teaching materials I had developed. The effort yielded a self-published eBook, Here’s Something About General Semantics. (no longer available)

Credit: author photo

In 2014, two colleagues, Mary from Manchester University in Indiana, and Greg from Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, joined me to develop a six-week course in general semantics hosted on the Canvas Network Learning Management System. The three of us worked well together to design a curriculum that featured our individual teaching strengths and areas of interest. We ended up with an enrollment of 1,300 participants from 67 countries.

Catalog entry for General Semantics: An Approach to Effective Language Behavior offered on the Canvas Network platform in 2014. Credit: author

After the End

I’ve struggled with telling this story. I didn’t anticipate that it would be so hard to re-visit the period beginning with my excitement at knowing the answer to a trivia question, to the reluctant sadness, disappointment and some anger due to my resignation. One of the chronological facts that I cannot deny is that my life outside of the general semantics ‘community’ has been longer than my time within it.

At one of our events after the grand opening of Read House, one of the senior trustees from the northeast expressed her joy and excitement to me, opining, “Do you realize what this means … you have a job for life here!”

At the time, I felt uncomfortable to consider that possibility. Now, I look back at the conversation without sentiment, other than to state that she voted in the majority two years later on the TCU proposal.

To wrap this up, I’d like to return to a previous sentence from my conversation with Jerry immediately after the trivia game: I tried to summarize what it was that had so interested me about the subject.

By that, I was referring to the following excerpt from the book I read for that linguistics class in 1979, Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa. I also used it as a preface to my final paper.

As it underlies my initial interest in general semantics, this statement also applies to me as one who participates in such use of language, and is therefore a never-ending, and never trivial, challenge.

… that widespread intraspecific [within the species] co-operation through the use of language is the fundamental mechanism of human survival, and that, when the use of language results, as it so often does, in the creation or aggravation of disagreements and conflicts, there is something wrong with the speaker, the listener, or both.

(S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, Harcourt Brace International, 1991)

BONUS CONTENT: Now that you’ve read the story, you can understand the movie. It goes fast with lots of photos in a short time, but it’s for the gestalt.

A tribute to those who came before me with the Institute of General Semantics. By the author. Music credits at the end.

Publication credits:

1. ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. I, №1, August 1943. Society for General Semantics, Chicago, Illinois.
2. ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, Volume XXV, №1, March 1968. International Society for General Semantics, San Francisco, California.
3. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Volume Sixty-One, Number Four, December 2004. Institute of General Semantics, Fort Worth, Texas.
4. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Volume Sixty-Three, Number One, January 2006. Institute of General Semantics, Fort Worth, Texas.
5. Bois, J. Samuel. The Art of Awareness: A Textbook on General Semantics, fifth printing, 1970. Wm. C. Brown Company Publishers. Dubuque, Iowa.
6. Hayakawa, S.I. in consultation with Basil H. Pillard, Antioch College. Language in Thought and Action, 1949. Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
7. Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Fifth Edition), 1994. International Non-Aristotelian Library. Englewood, New Jersey, USA.
8. Stockdale, Steve. Here’s Something About General Semantics: A Primer for Making Sense of Your World, 2009. Self-published eBook, ISBN 978–0–9824645–0–2. Santa Fe, New Mexico.