To Be or Not to Be, 0117 COBJ, Vol. 46 No. 1 Pg. 57
| Author | Mark Cohen, J |
Modern Legal Writing
Mark Cohen, J
To Be or Not to Be
“Is, ” “is. ” “is ”—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don ’t know what anything “is ”; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.
Robert Anton Wilson1
Would you like to clarify your thinking? Construct more persuasive arguments? Improve your writing? Reduce misunderstandings? You can Just avoid using the verb to be.
To be creates problems because we tend to use it like an equal sign We say, “The cat is white.” But cat and white are two different concepts. Cat denotes an animal. White denotes a color. If we can’t use is, we must instead say something like, “The cat has white fur”—a more accurate statement.
In the English language, the verb to be has at least seven distinct functions: identity (The cat is Garfield), class membership (Garfield is a cat), class inclusion (A cat is an animal), predication (The cat is furry), auxiliary (The cat is sleeping), existence (There is a cat), and location (The cat is in the hat).
Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American scholar who once served as a Russian intelligence officer, felt two forms of to be —identity and predication-had structural problems that often led to circular definitions. More generally, he believed our need to experience the world through language frequently led us to faulty conclusions, and he developed a discipline called general semantics intended to help avoid this.2
D. David Bourland, Jr. studied under Korzybski Bourland agreed that our use of to be often caused faulty reasoning, and in the late 1940s he began experimenting with a form of English that eliminated any form of to be.
He named this form of English “E-Prime” (short for English-Prime). He published an essay on it in 1965.3 Borland’s essay generated controversy, and continues to today, but for lawyers E-Prime offers many benefits:
1. E-Prime reveals the observer. The statement “The earth is round” conveys an impression of completeness, finality, and time-independence. It sounds like an absolute truth, just as the statement “The earth is flat” once sounded like an absolute truth Using E-Prime, we must instead say something like, “The earth looks round to me.” This reveals an observer, and observers may have flaws in perception
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