SOURCE: "General Semantics, Etc.," in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Dover Publications, 1957, pp. 281-91.

In the following excerpt, Gardner dismisses Korzybski's Science and Sanity as unoriginal and poorly written.

Korzybski was born in 1879 in Warsaw. He had little formal education. During World War I, he served as a major in Russia's Polish Army, was badly wounded, and later sent to the United States as an artillery expert. He remained in the States, and for the next ten years drew on his personal fortune to write Science and Sanity, the 800-page Bible of general semantics. The book was published in 1933 by the Count's International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company. It is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive, repetitious mish-mash of sound ideas borrowed from abler scientists and philosophers, mixed with neologisms, confused ideas, unconscious metaphysics, and highly dubious speculations about neurology and psychiatric therapy.

Allen Walker Read...