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Your most enchanted listener: GS Wisdom from Wendell Johnson.

Article Excerpt
WENDELL JOHNSON HAD A GREAT GIFT for making general semantics clear and compelling. That gift is particularly evident in his book Your Most Enchanted Listener. Between its covers one finds elegant writing and excellent examples that illustrate the practicality of general semantics to everyday life.

The front flap of the 1956 Harper edition of Your Most Enchanted Listener_offers this description, "This book might well be called How to Talk to Yourself, because it is fundamentally concerned with knowing what you're saying and saying what you mean. It is also a book about how to be dependable as an observer and honest as a reporter. It is about how not to tell a lie. It is about how not to be a sucker." Sound intriguing? Let's look into the manuscript and see what else can be discovered there.

Your Most Enchanted Listener: GS Wisdom from Wendell Johnson

In a beginning chapter, titled "Four Hundred Little Tugs Each Day," Johnson observes that the average four-year-old asks four hundred questions a day. These hundreds of questions are like tiny ropes at which the child tugs unremittingly in a heroic effort to get the world inside his head. And "The fateful fact is that he does get the world inside his head--a world that is his. And it is the world in which he is to spend the rest of his life--unless he turns out to be one of those rare creative persons who retain a country boy's popeyed view of the commonplace."

Commenting on another aspect of human development, Johnson notes, that unlike other animals, humans are "specialists in not specializing." Because of our highly developed brain cortex we have become the most adaptable creature in the world. People live all over the planet and perform a multiplicity of tasks. And one thing we are particularly good at doing is manipulating symbols, particularly language (GS labels humans "the symbolizing class of life").

In our use of language, Johnson maintains that no matter who one is talking to, every speaker is his most beguiled listener. In silent thoughts or speaking outwardly we are always talking to ourselves. That being the case, he advises that we should listen carefully to what we tell ourselves day after day, as our thoughts are heavy influencers of our emotions and actions.

Johnson says paying...

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