Off the Map

Despite some nice website designs under my belt, I regard myself as an amateur web designer.  I don’t take money for the work (almost categorically so), and I’m self-taught.  There’s a lot I don’t know about web design, but I’ve been amassing knowledge since college when I decided to play around with HTML tags.  Although I’m amateur, I ain’t bad.

Within the last couple years or so designing websites, I started to become aware of the term “semantic markup.”  I didn’t really understand what it meant until I watched an online web design screencast hosted by a man who invoked the term.  Through his use of the phrase “make it more semantic” (or something to that effect) and watching his behavior onscreen as he said it, I got the rough sense that the word “semantic” meant “descriptive.”

For example, let’s say he was naming different sections of a web design.  He could have called, say, this post section of my blog “area1.”  He could have called the black bar at the bottom of this website “area2.”  Given these labels, you wouldn’t be able to determine the function of each area in the website just by looking at the code.  “Area1” and “area2” aren’t that descriptive.  Instead he labeled area1 “content” and area2 “footer.”  As I understand it, by doing this he made his “markup” (the code) more “semantic” (descriptive).

This interpretation of the word “semantic” seems validated by this helpful article I found online:

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Practically speaking […] semantic markup is markup that is descriptive enough to allow us and the machines we program to recognize it and make decisions about it. In other words, markup means something when we can identify it and do useful things with it. In this way, semantic markup becomes more than merely descriptive. It becomes a brilliant mechanism that allows both humans and machines to “understand” the same information.

To this author, “semantic” means both descriptive and useful.

If we were a bit creative with the name of our field, considering that author’s approach to the word “semantic,” we might say that “general semantics” means “useful descriptions,” with the word “general” suggesting “in general.”  So, “general semantics” might mean “useful descriptions (in general),” meaning that some of the descriptions outlined as “useful” in the field of general semantics may in specific cases not be useful.

Coupling that with my recent definition of general semantics as “the study of thinking and its effects on language, behavior, and culture,” “description” is less so language and more so thinking.  In order to distinguish thinking and language, thinking might be thought of as preverbal, while language might be thought of as verbal.  Whatever the case, in Korzybski’s general semantics, thinking and language seem to be put on the same level by referring to both (essentially) as abstractings, yet differentiated ordinally.  If that phraseology doesn’t make sense to you, try this: In the process of processing reality, first we think, second we express in language.  “First” and “second,” from general math knowledge, are referred to as “ordinal terms.”  In other words, thinking and language are the-same-but-different.

I’m not really saying in this post to see general semantics as merely “generally useful descriptions,” but that interpretation of the name is quite interesting if ultimately creative.  It focuses one studying general semantics on what actually constitutes a useful description.  In the opinion of Alfred Korzybski, it would seem a useful description is one that is derived from science, that can be used in the development of technology, and (to invite in a bit of bias) for the betterment of humanity in the now and future generations.

See also: definition, description, semantic-markup