I’ve notice over the past few weeks that BE keeps weeding its way into my blogs. I just noticed “were” right in the second paragraph of my latest, and found a “be” in the first paragraph of one I started working on a little while ago. WTF?
I fee like B-English has snuck back in somehow. Does anyone else have this problem? It seems crazy to me, since I have written in E-prime for a while now and thought I had it all figured out… Maybe I feel too cocky. haha.
Know what? I think our speaking in b-english does it. It acts as a constant drag on the writing. I too thought I had it by second nature in writing, but in a recent post here on rewild I wrote “cease to be”. WTF? I didn’t even notice it till days later. Fortunately I caught it myself.
HAH!
When will we begin to speak in e-primitive, the international language of rewilding?
just kidding. about the international part.
Willem, I agree. Not just speaking B-English, but living in it.
After several months of epriming pretty much everything I write, I still see “to be” pop up where I don’t expect it when I look over my words later. It feels easier to do, some of the shifts in thinking have become more natural–like looking a little harder at the story I want to express. I have the toughest time with written conversations (email)–trying to speak “be-lessly” b/c I lose a lot of the nuance, like speaking a foreign language, sometimes I just can’t come up with a “be-less” way to say something that retains the finer shades of meaning I need (or do I? maybe something to look at. I notice folks do just fine speaking other languages with way more ambiguity left in them than english, with its sometimes scientific level of precision), and in email you can’t overcome that with body language. And sometimes my eprime just sounds a little stiff, but I let it go just to keep playing the game of trying out this new means of expression.
But I still see the ghosts of “to be” in my writing. I imply “to be” without actually saying it every time I use an adjective, or the more obvious workarounds of “:” or “=” or “see as” or “seems” or just plain leaving it out. I really think until we eprime the way we move through the world, see, experience, process, we will speak (or write) “eprime as a second language”. Then the words (rain) that precipitate out of our clouds of experience will take a different shape.
i just noticed in my introduction that even though i tried to write without “to be” in any form, i still ended the note “be well.”
tonight i thought about talking to my parents about e-primitive but instead began to carefully speak without “to be,” and it was tough. i found i paid much more attention to what i said, though, and it felt slightly mind-altering.