Hi Eric, You wrote: 'A simple question: wherein lies the "permanence" and the supposedly-misleading "identity" which the use of English 'primed' (or better, 'pruned) of the very TO BE is sipposed to 'cure'?' Within the sender's or receiver's model of course, where else? You wrote: "And what about APPEARS, SEEMS, and any other copular verb?" The identity and predicate usage of forms of the verb, "to be" carries with it in the words of linguist and creator of E-Prime, D. David Bourland, Jr. "completeness, finality, and time independence", similar to the effect of the process of nominalization upon experience.  Copular verbs do not invoke this association. Indulgence in "isness" has a tendency to bring with it the consequence of a rigid and dogmatic representation of 'reality'.  Whereas copular verbs facilitate openness to possibility.  As Bourland Jr. puts it: 'no structure can have precise identity with another — or even with itself at two different times, for that matter. Hence we can categorically deny the validity of any Identity relation. And accordingly, any linguistic structure which conveys or assumes an Identity relation does not correspond well with "reality."[...]"to be" — carries with it archaic associations and implications of permanence and static existence that we do not find in the "real world."'  A 'pruning' of the "is" of identity and and of the "is" of predication might help to bring about increased (verbal) congruency with the type of epistemology that is presented in WITW for semi-obvious reasons.  To quote Bourland Jr. quoting Russel (Our Knowledge of the external World, p.24): "The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of some subject-predicate form — in other words, that every fact consists of some thing having some quality — has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science and daily life."  Korzybski puts it thus: 'The subject-predicate form, the "is" of identity, and the elementalism of the Aristotelian system are perhaps the main semantic factors in need of revision, as they are found to be the foundation of the insufficiency of this system and represent the mechanism of semantic disturbances, making general adjustment and sanity impossible."  (Science and Sanity, p. 371)  All citations of Bourland Jr. were from his paper, TO BE OR NOT TO BE: E-Prime as a Tool for Critical Thinking. Here is a direct link to that paper for those interested: http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/epr1.htm#24. e_lie