Nine days ago, terrorists hijacked four airplanes here in the United States. Two of these planes were crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and another into the Pentagon building outside of Washington, DC. The fourth crashed (presumably through the actions of its crew and passengers) into a rural area of Pennsylvania. Currently, the casualty figures stand at: 266 passengers and crew on the four planes; 125 at the Pentagon; and 6,333 at the World Trade Center (with 6,291 injured).

This evening, President Bush addressed both houses of Congress to declare “war on terrorism”. He said countries around the world would have to choose, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”. He also vowed, “whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done”.

Since the attacks, the FBI has reported that numerous people of Arab descent have been attacked daily. It seems that outraged citizens have decided to take justice into their own hands, and that to them, all Arabs are ‘the same’.

After witnessing some of the ‘horrors’ of World War I, Korzybski concluded that if our ‘social sciences’ didn’t progress as fast as our technology, mankind was likely to destroy itself. This served to inspire him to study these matters, which resulted in his devising the system we call “general semantics”.

In my life, the need for Korzybski’s formulations has never been clearer. Un-sanity runs rampant, and leaders on both sides of the conflict use rhetoric to “fire up their followers”. No side of the socio-political continuum lacks for fanatics, dogmatists, absolutists, fundamentalists, etc.

This year, the Institute of General Semantics has been working on getting its out-of-print publications back into circulation. However, Words and What They Do To You seemed a bit too dated to be reprinted. Therefore, it was decided to make it available via our website in HTML form.

While we believe that anyone can find some useful insights in these lesson plans, we hope that teachers especially will find ‘ideas’ in them that they can use or modify for their classroom presentations. If you so wish, we encourage you to print out a copy of the book.

I owe a great debt of gratitude (once again) to Dr. Susan Presby Kodish for proofreading the initial version of this project. As usual, her keen eyes spotted many errors introduced in the process of transformation which I had overlooked from familiarity. Any errors which remain, are mine.

Homer Jean Moore, Jr.

Manchaca, Texas