SOURCE: "Eminent Semanticists," in Power of Words, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1954, pp. 125-50.

In the following excerpt, Chase combines a personal description of Korzybski with an assessment of his study of language.

Alfred Korzybski, who died in 1950, was the originator of what he called "General Semantics," a discipline which took the study of language and meaning into some pretty deep mathematical and neurological waters. It is still early to tell whether his contribution was as epoch-making as some starry-eyed followers believe, but it was unquestionably an important addition to the whole subject of communication.…

I shall never cease to be grateful for the wholesome shock my nervous system received when I first read Korzybski's magnum opus, Science and Sanity. It forced me to realize some of the unconscious assumptions imbedded in the language which I as a writer had been calmly accepting. Nature, he said, does not work the...