The Un-lsness of Is

For several years now, D. David Bourland Jr. has conscientiously scrubbed from his discourse and his writing all forms of the verb "to be." The first time he tried to do this, it gave him a headache. Now the practice comes so naturally that Bourland's listeners and readers are not likely to notice the omission. On the contrary, they are likely to be struck by the lucidity of his expression, which is commendably unambiguous if not always very lyrical. Where most people might render harsh judgment on themselves with "I'm no good at math," Bourland would express the thought with far less immutability: "I did not receive good grades in math," or "I did less well at math than at other subjects."

Unlike the California musician who once wrote a novel without the letter "e" just to see if it could be done, Bourland, 40, is not an eccentric visionary. He is the highly skilled president of Information Research Associates, a McLean, Va., think tank that does classified systems development for the U.S. Navy. Bourland, who has a master's degree in business administration from Harvard, was also a student at the Institute of General Semantics in Lakeville, Conn., where he became an ardent disciple of the linguistic theories of the leading prophet of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski. In Korzyb-ski's view, the verb "to be" was a dangerous and frequently misused word that was responsible for much of mankind's semantic difficulties. Going the master one better, Bourland has led a one-man crusade for the adoption of "E-prime" --which is his name for the English language minus "to be."

All Is Change. The semanticist's objection to the verb "to be" is based on certain philosophical convictions. One is a stern rejection of an axiom of classical logic, the principle of identity--that A is A, or a rose is a rose. In fact, argued Korzybski, the basic principle of life is not identity but, as the elliptical pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus put it, that all is change. Time and movement are inexorable, and in the fraction of a second that a rose is described it has already begun to alter.

The second philosophical conviction is that language influences behavior. Mankind is much less aware of the implacable reality of change simply because his language is dominated by the verb "to be," which implies a static quality of illusory permanence. "Our language," says Bourland, "remains the language of absolutes. The chief offender remains the verb 'to be.' The spurious identity it so readily connotes perverts our perception of reality."

One semantic harm done by "to be" is that it tempts man into erroneous value judgments. Korzybski noted dryly that a rose is not at all "red" to those afflicted by color blindness, and that redness itself is not a reality but a quality of reflected light to which the description "red" is arbitrarily assigned. Better to say, Korzybski suggested, "I classify the rose as red," or "I see the rose as red."

Undemonstrated Conclusions. E-prime, Bourland firmly insists, has certain advantages over conventional English. Certain questions that semanticists as well as many analytical philosophers regard as poorly structured--"What is man?", "What is art?", or Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be"--simply disappear as unaskable. Another is the elimination of essentially empty phrases --"Boys will be boys," for example, or "We know this is the right thing to do." A third advantage is that the E-prime user cannot blandly take refuge in waffling statements based on factually undemonstrated conclusions--sentences that begin with, say, "It is known that," or "It is certain."

Despite the stirring rhetorical flair of the Declaration of Independence, Bourland is even willing to rewrite it, in the interest of semantic clarity. In the standard text, the first sentence reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." A somewhat more prosaic E-Prime version: "We make the following assumptions: All citizens have equal political rights. All citizens simply by virtue of their existence have certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Bourland notes with some satisfaction that a number of scientific papers, not all done by Korzybski disciples, are now being written in E-prime; he is currently writing a book on how to speak and write without recourse to Isness. From personal experience, he claims that the use of E-prime can force a self-conscious but salutary revision in the speaker's outlook on life. "Once you realize that every time you say 'is' you tell a lie," he says, "you begin to think less of a thing's identity and more of its function. I find it much harder to be dishonest now."

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