Thankful for General Semantics

[houseboatonstyx]

Any fans of General Semantics around? I'm rusty on the terms.


The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing.

The thing now is people now eating turkey etc in late November, many having pictures of Pilgrims and Indians etc.
The thing in 1621 was Pilgrims and Indians  eating turkey etc in late November.

 Neither our parties nor the 1621 party had much actual giving of thanks to God. Quakers don't actually quake. Methodists aren't actually very methodical -- these terms are REFERENTIAL. They are just labels for pointing to something, not a description of what Quakers and Methodists -- and 'Thanksgiving guests -- actually do now. 
.

'Thanksgiving_1863' is not 'Thanksgiving_2013' 

'Thanksgiving' is a word, a label. Politicians some decades ago started applying it to people eating turkey etc in late November, relating this occasion to thanking God. (The Pilgrims did not use the term for their party. When they thanked God, they did it differently, with solemn ceremonies they did call 'thanksgiving'.)

Because the term now refers to our party, and our party is very similar to the 1621 party, we use the term to refer to the 1621 party as 'the first Thanksgiving'. 

A would-be editor at Wikipedia has these facts but makes the wrong language conclusions. He needs a course in General Semantics.  (So do I, obviously.)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Thanksgiving_(United_States) scroll down to  "First Thanksgiving was 1863".