What it is

E-Prime is an English-language constraint associated with General Semantics that avoids forms of the verb to be. The Institute of General Semantics describes it as a tool involving English “without the use of be-verbs.” Institute of General Semantics ↗

Three JQD uses

  1. .EXE: 150 People I Don't Need, Described: “CONTINUALLY FAILED ATTEMPTS AT E-PRIME.” The failure itself is kept.
  2. Was It Good For You? Is It?: an “E-PRIME SCAN” produces PASS/FAIL counts and a rough percentage, turning grammar into a quality-control interface.
  3. Blown Dust, Tactless Data Loss: the existence of E-Prime prompts the imagined existence of its inverse — an “oppressor god-tongue.”

Why it belongs here

E-Prime sits at a junction between Lines Imposed Upon Fields, Legibility / Life, Normative Collapse and Corruption Linguistics. A grammatical rule tries to make thought more precise; JQD then tests the rule by failing it, scoring it and imagining its demonic opposite.

Provenance

E-Prime was developed by D. David Bourland in the context of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. The JQD occurrences are therefore treated as explicit imported technique, not a JQD coinage.