To start out, I’ll explain my stance. I do agree that cutting down on the verb “to be” often makes sentences more clear and more active. However, I don’t think that people should ditch the verb entirely. “To be” tends to make sentences wordier, just because in order to use it you mention two ideas and equate them, rather than mention one idea and elaborate on it. The clarity gained in taking the latter approach is commendable. However, it’s not the gold standard for communication: it’s just one way of writing a sentence. In the same way, sometimes one idea will call for a different sentence pattern than another will. Ernest Hemingway made great use of the contrast between long and short sentences. Most people use whatever size sentence comes to their head first, and similarly they use “to be” whenever the idea they’re expressing seems to call for it. Better communication can involve a conscious decision to cut down on “to be”, but in certain cases that verb is the most effective way to express an idea, and abandoning it completely makes little sense.

I do think you have a good point with re-verbing nouns, and I enjoy your story about Giuliana and whether she can consider herself a writer. Looking for the verb that parented a noun can make thinking clearer, and more direct. This proposal struck somewhat of a chord with me, and I think I’ll start re-verbing nouns somewhat in the future. However, our world will always be a world of things. As was discussed in a Rewild conversation, even if you re-verb, you end up with nouns. Now, you could boil a sentence down to pronouns - for example, “I used a wolf hide to line my parka” could become “I used an it-hunts-in-(they-stay-together)s’s it-keeps-one’s-(they-do-bodily-functions)-from-falling-out to line my it-keeps-one-warm.” However, boiling everything down to pronouns like that clearly takes too much thought and time to be practical. Nouns are a natural shorthand, and making them all verbs won’t work entirely. Doubtless you already knew that, and also know that re-verbing is more of an exercise to make some nouns a bit more clearer, and make identities less rigid. I just want to point out that re-verbing has a limit to its usefulness.

I was thinking about the idea that using “to be” tells a little bit of a lie every time. I’ll continue the previous line of conversation that mentioned the rising sun. Now, it’s true that the only thing you can mention with absolute certainty is what your senses have informed you of. Thus, saying “The sun is in the sky” represents an induction from the original thought, “I see the sun in the sky.” However, it’s not just the verb “to be” that represents this kind of induction. Far from it, in fact: every single verb in English that doesn’t mention your senses in some way represents an induction from a thought that does mention your sentence. So, “He made a bowdrill” is necessarily an induction from “I saw him making something that looks to me like a bowdrill.” And “She walked to work” originally was “I heard a voice that I presume belongs to someone, telling me that she walked to work.” If you’re interested in absolute truth, ditching “to be” isn’t enough; all your sentences have to follow the approximate structure of Descartes’s classic “I think, therefore I [exist]”. If you’re interested in conveying information, as most people who use language are, you have to lose that framework in favor of something more useful and time-efficient.

In conclusion: using “to be” less will make your communication more direct and concise. Using “to be” not at all will make your communication more forced and difficult, and make it take longer. The trick is to use it just enough.

Cheers!

P.S. I’ve joined the Rewild forum: Number3Pencils.

Does this make sense?

No

I thought that I would write about something completely different today.
There is a whole movement, or sub culture amongst us that believes in “rewilding” ourselves and our ways of life to a more natural and primitive form.
This has to do …

I have to say, it boggles my mind as to why you’d waste your time in this way, if you see it as such. At least Torjus and gunnix kept their declarations of disinterest concise.

That said, here are a few more points for your consideration:

E-prime thinking has encouraged me to only use examples that have actually occured.

I realize you think this is a terribly powerful statement in support of E-prime thinking. But in my own personal experience, an inability to consider abstract concepts, future possibilities, or hypothetical situations has been one particular checkmark that always falls solidly in the “con” category.

People have used this “sun rising” idea many times in conversation with me to rebut the notion of afactuality. By definition, this exempts it from the straw-man fallacy.

Actually, “by definition,” it still is a staw man fallacy, the definition being, “The author attacks an argument which is different from, and usually weaker than, the opposition’s best argument.” You may have proven your opponent wrong, but neither of you were actually talking about factuality to begin with. And the fact that these people you spoke to thought they were providing a solid case does not make your own argument any less fallacious.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work either. You’ve made another induction. “I see the Sun in the sky, before I’ve seen it rise to that point, therefore it again must have gotten there by rising.”

That’s not really an example of inductive reasoning so much as it is an understanding of the definition of the word “rise.” Unless of course, and I assume this is where you’re going here, your point is to call into question the reliability of our senses themselves. And sure, it’s possible that nothing I’m seeing is actually real. I could just be a brain in some jar of formaldehyde that’s plugged into the Matrix. Yes, I know I already did a Matrix reference in my last comment. But shut up. I’m trying to make a point here. And the point is that this idea, while it may be interesting to consider from a ninth-grade stoner level of philosophical depth, ultimately isn’t terribly helpful. Similarly, you could also argue that the sun technically doesn’t rise at all. It’s merely the Earth revolving around the sun. But now you’re just being purposely difficult. You know full well what a person means when he says that the sun has risen, and the only reason to pretend otherwise is out of some desperate need for attention. So if it will make you feel better, I’ll admit that you’re smart, and we’re all terribly impressed. There. Now we can move on.

But here’s the real question. You say that using “to be” is the same as telling a lie. Well, who’s being more dishonest here? The person pretending not to know something that he honestly does know in order to make an irrelevent philosophical point or the person who just says, “The sun is rising?”

How could you “be” hungry? Do I feel you in my stomach ever time I hunger? You’ve become the avatar of hunger, the incarnation of appetite? Obviously not. You mean that you hunger, not that you “are” hungry. We all know that you lied to us with your statement, and we can generally accept such an innocuous deceit and sloppy use of language.

Except, of course, that “being hungry” means exactly the same bloody thing as to “feel hunger.” That’s the glory of the adverb there. “Hungry” is not the same as “hunger.” That’s why they’re two different words.

Does any of this matter? I would say it absolutely does, and here we get to the reason Willem invoked scientists, and quantum theory in particular. English speakers find quantum physics almost completely incomprehensible. Only the most brilliant English speakers can really understand quantum physics, though many more pretend to, or even earnestly believe that they do. Yet, for native speakers, quantum mechanics comes much more easily (see this report on a conference of quantum physicists and native speakers, previously offered upthread).

I suppose I’ll just hand you the benefit of the rather enormous doubt for the time being and assume that your interpretation is correct. And why not? After all, use of the word “to be” must be the deciding factor here because, as we all know, that is the one and only difference between native cultures and English-speaking cultures. Which is why, of course, Russia and the Arab world, whose languages also lack forms of the verb “to be,” are so far ahead of the United States in the areas of physics and engineering, right?

My wife constantly worries and agonizes over whether she can call herself a “writer.” In E-Prime, this problem does not exist.

Doesn’t exist? All right, now we’re just getting carried away with ourselves. Are you seriously suggesting that other cultures don’t have questions about personal identity simply because they may phrase the question differently? If so, what you’re describing isn’t so much a different culture as it is a different species.

Don’t get me wrong. Your ideas on the consequences of using the verb “to be” are interesting. But in the end, that’s all they are. It’s just food for thought really. Maybe not even actual food. More like pixie sticks for thought. They’re sweet and give you a nice sugar rush but are, ultimately, unfilling.

It’s just like Aristotle. He once thought that frogs are born from mud. And it all made perfectly logical sense given what they knew at the time. After all, you never see a frog giving birth to another frog or a frog hatching from an egg. The first time you ever see something that’s fully identifiable as a frog is when it’s crawling out of the mud. Of course, what we know now that Aristotle didn’t is that frogs are amphibious, starting off their lives as tadpoles.

And that’s just the problem when you try to philosiphize about natural phenomena. Your interpretation of the facts may be compelling, but without any kind of proof, a good idea is all it really is. And in the end, that’s what this argument boils down to. You can’t prove that your interpretation is right, and I can’t prove that it’s wrong. So this whole thing is just a colossal waste of time except for, as I mentioned above, an exercise in intellectual masturbation.

And as if to punctuate my point, I would like to bring your attention to Jason’s response to Torjus, who I thought actually made a rather good point. Yet Jason responds to a 17-word comment with a 1,000+ word post. Something just seems vaguely wrong with that.

Understanding the internet always acts as a barrier, if your words have any ability to communicate the results of your philosophy, I find it really unappealing.

As an ambassador, the person that your re-wilding ideas seem to create, doesn’t seem interested in understanding me, my heart, where I’ve come from, where I need to go next. Your words sound really angry, and ungenerous.

Seeing all that, why would I want to visit this place you offer up?

Whatever you may think of my perspective, I can tell you it has made for better and better friendships, and more satisfying family life. I don’t see this as a priority for you, and this may explain why we’ve taken different paths.

yrs,
Willem

If speaking english feels so bad to you (as it once did to me) why not try this: don’t use it (or any language) at all. Think in pictures/emotions. Vent your feelings through new sounds that spontaneously appeal to you. Better yet, try “language attrition.” Go for a few years without speaking english, and you WILL lose most of it. Don’t believe me? Read some of the accounts of feral children and even adolescents who were isolated in the wilderness and simply lost their ability to speak.

ANIMALS are the archetypical and TRULY wild creatures, the ones we should try to emulate. They make practical decisions, not ones based on morals. If an animal had the ability to use language, he would. If a chimpanzee had a rifle and knew how to use, he would not hesitate to. If a bear has the choice to raid a dump or eat sedge, which one do you think she would normally choose?

Even in captivity or when domesticated, animals have a freedom beyond what we can imagine. Their minds are not held captive by religion and morals, or even by ideals. They accept reality because there is nothing else. They do not live for a future hope that they can not imagine and that is not real anyway.

I don’t know about you all, but I can’t stand artificiality and pretense. I want to experience the RAW REALITY of living, not through some silly constructed (or deconstructed, whatever you want to call it) language like e-prime or make-believe “community” like Teaching Drum (I’ve been there; they are sedentary and entirely reliant on money and store-bought commodities, though their website makes them appear to be true hunter-gatherers).

Do you want to really live WILD? Try doing whatever you feel like doing. Follow your deepest instincts. ENJOY LIFE no matter where you find yourself. The “rewilding” crew make living wild seem like the most nearly impossible and difficulty task in the world. They say you need a “community” god knows how many “skills” and supernatural animist abilities. Come on, be real. Its not happening for them. Not one has “rewilded.” I am tired of the fucked-up “its a process” lie they are feeding us–its just another lie of civilization.

Here’s the truth: living wild is so easy a child can do it. Its so easy a homeless guy can do it. Or a tiny mouse. Or your pet cat. The real question is, DO YOU REALLY WANT TO?