i feel so excited right now, im twitching! i dislike the attempt to impose timelessness on the world, eprime seems like it might help to remove a lot of this from speech. i like to try -and fail, mostly- to relate to things as they are now and as the seem to me directly. everyday i grow more hateful of abstractions. i was skeptical of eprime as i dislike rules in general, but then i read a criticism of eprime that read
- A civilization advances when it can move from the idea of individual trees to that of forest. E-Prime tends to make the expression of higher orders of abstraction more difficult, e.g. "She is a student" is rendered in E-Prime, e.g., as "She attends classes at the university".
and i almost screamed.
i also go after 'is' a lot in my ramblings, but had never heard of eprime until i noticed @dot mention it in a couple of comments.
that said, i didnt write this in eprime, i tried to write it as i would usually write, though no doubt i was influenced by eprime. i wonder if the blanket ban on 'to be' is as useful as selective removal? are there perhaps other things that might be done to make the use of our language more thoughtful?
for instance; how would you render 'i am twitching!' in eprime?
or 'i was influenced by the idea of eprime'?
for some reason uses of 'to be' in reference to myself dont necessarily seem to provoke the same negative reaction in me as others uses do. i wonder if you have any thoughts on this?