43. E-Prime

Sometimes I tell people that I speak a more permissive dialect of E-Prime. (Less often these days.) In particular, I speak (and write in) a relaxed dialect of E-Prime in order to help clarify my thoughts, separate facts from observations from opinions, and make judgements about value and "what things count as" more explicit. Indeed, if you look back through any of the posts on this blog, you'll find them mostly in keeping with the E-Prime-like principles I describe here.

But what does E-Prime involve, anyway? What goes into E-Prime, and why might you want to shape your words more in accordance with it? E-Prime is a more restrictive form of English developed by D. David Bourland, Jr, a student of Alfred Korzybski's, as part of the old project of General Semantics; to use E-Prime in its strictest sense, all you need do is refuse to use any form of the verb "to be". After all, "to be" has far too many functions! It can denote existence: "there is a fox"; location: "the fox is in the woods"; class membership: "Reynard is a fox"; class inclusion: "every fox is a mammal"; aspectual modifications of verbs to the progressive and passive: "the fox was running", "the fox was being chased"; predication: "the fox is orange"; identity: "that kit is the fox's child"; and probably others, too. This seems far too messy! The verb "to be" also permits you to pass off your observations and judgments as objective truth with far too much ease: "the dress is blue and black", say.

For my part, I have no problem with a few of these senses, so the dialect of E-Prime I generally use has a few modifications. First off, the "to be"s of existence, location, and especially verb aspect all seem fine to me, as well as class membership/subsethood and identity, to a lesser extent. Other languages have quick obvious words or constructions for "there is/are X" and "X is in/located-at..." - Korean, Spanish, and French all come to mind here - and as ever, I refuse to be restricted by English's occasional but ever-present poverty. Likewise, if you go poking around some in epistemology, semantics, or metaphysics for more on this, the concept of a "necessary" truth - as opposed to a "contingent" one - is pretty close to my reason why I'm alright with some kinds of subsethood and identity claims. What's more, as a mathematician, sometimes I really do get to say things including that one thing is identical to another (equality), or that every instance of type A is also an instance of type B (subset containment), and mean it, and have a strong justification for meaning it. (Math is a kind of magic in that way, among others.) Other forms of "to be", I sometimes permit for the sake of clarity, especially if accompanied by softeners like "I think that..." or "It seems like..." or "very likely", to make the gap between judgment and reality more clear; I still consider them worth avoiding. On the other hand, E-Prime doesn't go far enough in some ways: I think it best to avoid sharp sweeping value judgments of the kind implied by "good" and "bad"; also that words like "should" and "just"/"simply" often sneak in particularly harmful value judgments about best courses of action, or the degree of difficulty of those courses of action. So - I sometimes succinctly sum up my dialect of E-Prime as "Words like 'to be', 'good/bad', 'should', and 'just' are bad, so you should just try not to use them."

I thus recommend that everyone use words like I do, avoiding epistemic overconfidence and inclarity of values. To use words in such a way not only doesn't leave you worse off, but it often passes unnoticed. After all, did you notice that basically this entire post was written so? Give it a try yourself!

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