e-prime

I hear the sound of my father rolling over briskly in his grave. "Only a fool could think of e as an integer! Why dishonor Euler so? Have the idiot legislators who set the value of pi to three even struck again?" he thunders. Um, come to think of it, I should actually imagine Dad's jar rotating in his columbarium niche. More detail than you want, perhaps?

Sleep well, father. E-prime provides linguistic, not mathematical discipline. If you don't want to follow the link, that means: "In essence, E-Prime consists of a more descriptive and extensionally oriented derivative of English, that automatically tends to bring the user back to the level of first person experience." It works its magic by eliminating all forms of the verb "to be" from speech, written and spoken.

I find this hard to do, but notice that the above blog entry contains no such structures. Of course, my training in Russian gives me a leg up because the Russian language lacks a present tense form of that verb. So I worked without it regularly in my youth.