Page "E-Prime" Paragraph 2

D. David Bourland, Jr. ( 1928 – 2000 ) proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski's general semantics some years after Korzybski's death in 1950.

Bourland, who had studied under Korzybski, coined the term in a 1965 essay entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime ( originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin ).

The essay quickly generated controversy within the general semantics field, partly because practitioners of general semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb ' to be ' as such, and not just certain usages.