This One's for Real

I alreadyknow what the quote means to the person who first made, a guy named Alfred Korzybski. He wrote a lot about the meanings we give to words. How it is that often, far too often, we confuse the word with the thing it represents.

What if, we're going on a date? Being cheap, you decide to write the name of the person on a piece of paper and take the paper instead of the person? We do stuff just as silly. React to a person's race or profession or where he lives, but not react to the real person.

There are two general things different betwen maps and territories: 1. A map is never completely up to date, the territory keeps changing. 2. No map ever contains everything in the territory; maps leave out most of what's there. Words are like that too, but we think because we label something, it will remain that something forever. In the time you've taken to read this, thousands of your body's cells have fallen off your body, and thousands more have come into being to replace them.

I'm really interested in what you think.