E Prime- Enhance Your Reality By Tweaking Your Language

Hi, my patients call me Dr. Shapiro and my mother named me Jim. I currently choose to identify as an alcoholic. (Typical greeting given by an E Prime speaker at an AA meeting)

Like it or not, language creates our realities. In a sense, it forces us all to subscribe to a particular brand of reality fundamentalism. Perhaps the biggest culprit behind languages ability to dogmatize reality is the vicious verb “to be,” which creates what Alfred Korzybski (General Semantics) called the “is of identity.” We all have a tendency to brand things in our universe by saying that something is something else (e.g., the book is blue and square-shaped, Jake and Mike are feminine nincompoops, Jesus is my lord and savior, etc). Whenever we use the verb “to be” we are making an assumption about the absolute nature of something in our environment. This gives us comfort by providing a stable, unchanging view of reality, which allows us to cease having to question the validity of our perceptions. For those of us who prefer to experiment with life, however, it may be wise to heed Korzybski’s advice to abolish the “is of identity” from our language as much as possible. This form of language that lacks the verb “to be” is called E (English) Prime.

Here are some examples of sentences translated from Standard English into E Prime taken from Robert Anton Wilson’s book, “Quantum Psychology:”

SE: The photon is a wave.
EP: The photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments.

SE: The photon is a particle.
EP: The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

SE: John is unhappy and grouchy.
EP: John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office.

SE: John is bright and cheerful.
EP: John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach.

SE: The car involved in the hit-and-run accident was a blue Ford.
EP: In memory, I think I recall the car involved in the hit-and-run accident as a blue Ford.

SE: That is a fascist idea.
EP: That seems like a fascist idea to me.

SE: Grass is green.
EP: Grass registers as green to most human eyes.

As you can see, the use of E Prime abolishes absolutistic thinking and preserves the subjectivity of our perceptions, which seems like the best method for arriving at the clearest description of our reality. Wilson uses the first two examples as a case in point. He points out the fact that physicists have observed photons appearing as both waves and particles depending on the instruments used in the observation. Naturally, these scientists largely divided into two camps: those who thought photons were actually waves and those who thought they were actually particles. The paradox was that both could be true depending on the instruments used. When grappling with this conundrum, others concluded that since photons really can appear as both waves and particles they cannot be either of those things, and, therefore must be something else for which there was no name yet (some proposed adopting the term wavicle). When tweaking your language system to incorporate E Prime, however, this problem presents no contradiction whatsoever. That a photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments and as a particle when constrained by other instruments is not regarded as anything especially peculiar. When using Standard English, however, trying to fully comprehend the implications of this contradictory proposition could potentially lead to complete mental collapse.

Getting rid of that seemingly innocuous little “to be” verb can forcefully pry open the doors of our perception. It seems that learning to write and speak in this manner can serve as a valuable intellectual endeavor that enriches and broadens one’s horizons. Why then is E Prime virtually unheard of in the scientific community? The easy answer seems to me that scientists are just as prone to absolutistic thinking as those wacky people of faith. The whole scientific enterprise presents itself as a quest to find out what is objectively true in our universe. To get rid of the “is of identity” would mean to deny that scientific evidence can prove anything as pure fact. It would also call into question the absolute legitimacy of the scientific method as the best tool for acquiring knowledge.

It appears to me that we like the word ‘is’ and its correlates so much because we crave stability in our lives. We want to trust that our perceptions are accurate representations of some objective reality that exists independent of our interpretation. {The fox is red, not auburn goddamn it! I am a happy-go-lucky person for Christ’s sake! There is a God and He is great! There is no God and certainly no eternal soul! }These are just more common examples of how we routinely employ the “is of identity” in our daily lives. At the very least, the exercise of removing this verb from our language will likely help us become more skeptical of some of our rigid beliefs about the world around us.

I have drawn but one conclusion from my preliminary investigations with using E Prime: we as humans appear afraid of, and therefore resist being open to investigating our world too much. We fear the consequences of thoroughly questioning the validity of our reality tunnel perhaps because we are afraid of the potential for complete and utter mental deterioration. There may be some validity to that fear though, which is why there is nothing wrong with staying in our respective reality tunnels. We can still, however, acknowledge that what we believe to be true can only really be considered true within our limited perspectives of reality. This seems to me a worthy start to operating in the spirit of what E Prime is all about.

I encourage those interested in E Prime to read more about it and to experiment with its use in your daily life. A word of caution though: excessive use of E Prime language in the public sphere will almost certainly cause others to view you with considerable suspicion and may result in a commitment to a psychiatric hospital. Remember, most feeble brains do not seem wired to compute the changes that are encouraged by the use of E Prime, so tread lightly at first.

(This essay was largely written in E Prime. The "is of identity" was italicized when used to enunciate the flimsy nature of the verb "to be.")

-Wolf