General semantics was a movement initiated by the work of Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) in Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics (1933), propagated through the journal ETC., by Stuart Chase (1938, 1954), and probably best known to linguists from the work of S. I. Hayakawa (1949). Its aim is “The study and improvement of human evaluative processes with special emphasis on the relation to signs and symbols, including language” (Chase 1954: 128). General semantics is unlike other schools of semantics because it makes no pretence of proposing a theory, or even systematic study, of meaning in natural language. Leaving aside questions of sanity and therapy, general semantics clearly has a mission to educate people. Its advocates warn against the dangers of being hoodwinked by propaganda, euphemism, gobbledygook, and even ordinary everyday language. In part, the movement was a response to the affective and all too effective jargon of European totalitarianism (both fascism and communism) and of McCarthyism in the United States. So a constant theme in general semantics is ‘Don’t be bamboozled by what is said, search for the meaning and substance in all that you hear.’ The focus on extension renders general semantics a branch of positivism and verificationism. In spoken and written utterances, language has physical substance; but for general semantics there was no notion that language is also an abstract entity. It concerned itself not at all with decontextualized meaning (semantics as an abstract entity), but with an operational definition of meaning that can be verified in the context of utterance. General semantics emphasizes that one individual being will have innumerable attributes, but there is a tendency to focus on only one or two of these to the exclusion of others. There is a concern that stereotypes of, say, “Jews”, “Blacks”, “Women-drivers”, “Men”, and “Communists” apply some specific characteristic of a few individuals to a whole class of people and ignore other, perhaps contrary, characteristics to be found among individuals within the class. General semantics never attempted to offer the kind of semantic theory that we find described in a textbook on linguistic semantics. It was more of an educational program that makes cautionary observations at the populist level on affective language use. General semantics was a pragmatically based account of meaning, whose value for present-day pragmatics has not always been properly appreciated. Bolinger (1980) clearly sees a place for it as one of the forerunners of pragmatics; it is also clear that the aims of general semantics to a large extent converge with the aims of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis to raise people’s consciousness of how language is used to persuade or even manipulate.