[Gertrude Stein's famous line "A Rose is a rose is a rose" first appeared in Sacred Emily (1913) and showed up in later works as well. "Sacred Emily" can be found in:

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
Vintage Books, 1990

Geography and Plays
University Press, 1993 (reprint)

Source: http://www.geocities.com/jiji_muge/isarose.html]
 
 

["Do you sometimes make two very different names for the same thing?"

"Of course not. It wouldn't stay the same if I made another very different name for it. Giving a thing a quite new name makes it be a new thing. Everyone knows that!"

"Oh, my boy, few men know that. Do you know what very nearly all men say? They say that a rose by any other name would smell the same.

"That's not true!" said the boy. "That's not true at all!"

"Of course it isn't true," said the wise old Frenchman. "I have made a verse about that, and you can learn it:

A rose with onion for its name
Might never, never smell the same --
And canny is the nose that knows
An onion that is called a rose.

Source: Selection from "There Might Once Have Been a Wise Old Frenchman . . .," Wendell Johnson, Your Most Enchanted Listener, chapter one, p. 5 (1956); excerpts at https://www.nicholasjohnson.org/wj/wjymel.html ]
 
 

[59] . . . The seeing that is believing and the believing that is seeing make of the world we make for ourselves a haunted habitation. We are remarkably adept at believing what we have never seen -- and at seeing what we have come to believe.

This we may understand so far as we understand projection. Projection is a bodily process. It is part and parcel of the workings of the nervous system. Most of us know far less about it, however, and are much less directly aware of it than we are of our other bodily processes, such as digestion and breathing. Even those who know little about their own digestive functions are at least made keenly aware of them now and then by the wordless eloquence of pain or [60] comfort. But the workings of projection are all but concealed from our inlets to direct awareness. We learn of our own projections, when we do, mainly through circumstantial evidence.

This circumstantial evidence arises chiefly in connection with certain of our mistakes in perception and judgment. They are the kinds of mistakes, in many cases, that we can make over and over again without suspecting that we are making any mistakes at all. In fact, in some of their forms, they are mistakes that we simply must make if we are to go on believing, feeling, and behaving as we have been trained and encouraged to do by our unrelenting teachers, love and fear. And by the same token they are precisely the mistakes that we must cease to make if we are to achieve the changes that we prize as self-development.

The basic fact about projection is simply this: What we look at is not what we see.

What we see is determined not alone by what stares us in the face, but also by our wishes and our doubts, our likes and dislikes, our fears, assumptions, knowledge, and ignorance. In general, it is what we take for granted, our fixed beliefs and settled expectations, that we project outward, coloring and distorting -- even obliterating or creating -- whatever there may be in our field of stimulation. It has been summed up in pat fashion by Ralph Evans, color-control expert, in The Scientific American (August, 1949, page 55): "We see what we believe we are looking at. Our mental pictures are our own. They are not necessarily shared either by others or by the objects themselves." And sometimes we see what isn't there at all: the believing that is seeIng.

Except as we understand the process of projection we can [61] neither trust our own observation nor evaluate properly the reports made to us by other observers. When we tell ourselves what we have seen -- or heard, touched, tasted, smelled, or felt -- our words refer in some measure to something other than what they seem to be about. . . . [Our] remark[s are] largely about us, and may say little that is trustworthy about the [world outside].

. . .

[70] . . . projection . . . self-projection . . . is a bodily process, as natural and as unavoidable as any other bodily process. We cannot eliminate it. We can only be more or less aware of it, and more or less honest and adept at taking it into account when we evaluate what we say -- to ourselves as well as to each other. And we can be more or less forthright in warning our listeners that the statements we make to them are, in fact, self-projections. Our listeners are to be clearly and often reminded that we cannot utter, that no one can utter, factual truths that are absolute, unstrained by human protoplasm.

Unless we are aware of projection, seeing does become believing and believing seeing. One who is unconscious of projection can be persuaded -- can indeed hardly avoid persuading himself -- that nothing is something and something is nothing. Such a one is not only inclined to encourage himself to pursue mirages and to frighten himself with his own bemused interpretations of the moonbeams on his bedroom wall. He is also likely to take as his leader anyone properly behatted, and he is even capable, if he has the talent, of becoming himself a leader, taken in as completely by his own exhortations and official postures as he would be by those of any other rightly besymboled authority. . . .

[71] [F]or all of us, . . . the worlds we manage to get inside our heads are mostly worlds of words, words that become our unrelenting own. And so it is that in these worlds of words inside our heads we hold ourselves captive. To a far greater degree than we are prompted to suppose we do, we take our words to be reality, and by so much we lose contact with the world outside the bony brain cases from which we peer nearly unsightfully.

We differ most wonderfully from all unspeaking creatures when we are conscious of words and what we do with them and because of them -- and what they do to us -- and when we are aware of our bodily processes of perception and symbolization, of projection and abstraction. The magic of symbolic communication transforms men into humanity. . . .

Excerpt from "The Believing That is Seeing," in Wendell Johnson, Your Most Enchanted Listener, chapter eight, pp. 59-61, 70-71 (1956).
 
 

"Triolet

(To an unwilling student of general
semantics -- which would not be
a description, I trust, of Nick Johnson.)

"To a mouse, cheese is cheese;
that's why mousetraps work." W. Johnson,
People in Quandaries.

To a rodent, cheese is cheese,
    That's why mousetraps work.
No date or index if you please,
To a rodent cheese is cheese
Without semantic subtleties
    (Listen, you mouse-brained jerk!)
To a rodent, cheese is cheese;
That's why mousetraps. (WORK!)

Don Hayakawa
Oct. 25, 1954"

[Inscription in instructor's copy of Hayakawa, Language, Meaning and Maturity (1953). General semanticist "Don" Hayakawa was, later in life, California's U.S. Senator "Sam" Hayakawa.]
 
 

Notwithstanding the substantial advantages automobile manufacturers (most notably Volkswagon) have found to putting engines in the rear, almost all (if not all) of the first efforts at automobile design involved putting engines in the front of the car.

1. Having read the material above, what theory might you offer for this choice of location of the engine?

2. What does this page (and this question and answer) have to do with our study of cyberlaw?