Zuiikin Gals II. Randy "Flock of Dodos" Olson Speaks. TEN THINGS EVOLUTIONISTS CAN DO TO IMPROVE COMMUNICATION. CoComment - clear conversation in the blogosphere. Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams. After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company's web site, if you click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative. " The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases.
Western Union has not failed. The world's first telegram was sent on May 24, 1844 by inventor Samuel Morse. Western Union goes back to 1851 as the Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. Other company highlights: E-Prime. TOWARD UNDERSTANDING E -PRIME Robert Anton Wilson E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb "to be," has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity.
Korzybski pointed out the pitfalls associated with, and produced by, two usages of "to be": identity and predication. His student D. David Bourland, Jr., observed that even linguistically sensitive people do not seem able to avoid identity and predication uses of "to be" if they continue to use the verb at all. Bourland pioneered in demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of "to be," calling this subset of the English language "E-Prime. " "Coke is it. " And here gives some other examples that work better without E-prime (but what in the world do they mean?) "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.... " Of course anyone can express vagueness and falsehoods just as easily with E-prime, but it wouldn't have the impact without "to be" forms.