There is a basic law in Word Clearing:

You might suppose at once that it is the BIG words or the technical words which are most misunderstood.

AT THE BOTTOM OF ALL ALTERATION OF MEANING OR ACTION IS A MISUNDERSTOOD WORD.

This is not the case.

This law at once explains why communication, ideas or application become falsified, twisted and corrupted.

On actual test, it was English simple words and not Dianetics and Scientology words which prevented understanding.

This law is of great use in Word Clearing:

For some reason Dianetics and Scientology words are more easily grasped than simple English.

A. It indicates who has to be word cleared FAST, at once, NOW, before duties go off the rails any further.

Words like “a”, “the”, “exist”, “such” and other “everybody knows” words show up with great frequency when doing a Method 2 Word Clearing. They read.

B. It detects the area just before which there is a misunderstood word.

It takes a BIG dictionary to define these simple words fully. This is another oddity. The small dictionaries also suppose everybody knows.

A is useful to the administrator. Knowing it and knowing Word Clearing and being able to do it himself or get it done, he can avoid wholesale dismissals, frantic transfers, general inefficiency and organizational strain.

It is almost incredible to see that a university graduate has gone through years and years of study of complex subjects and yet does not know what “or” or “by” or “an” means. It has to be seen to be believed. Yet when cleaned up his whole education turns from a solid mass of question marks to a clean useful view.

B is very useful to the Word Clearer.

A test of schoolchildren in Johannesburg once showed that Intelligence decreased with each new year of school!

Example of B. A person can do everything on an order except „File the Folders” which he insists on delivering to a wrong room. Look over the order and find where in it it talks about filing folders. Just above or beside that will be a misunderstood word. Locate it, get it identified, defined and used in sentences. The person can suddenly file folders!

The answer to the puzzle was simply that each year they added a few dozen more crushing misunderstood words onto an already confused vocabulary that no one ever got them to look up.

Just BEFORE or WITH the point a person begins to alter will be found a misunderstood word. Thus

Stupidity is the effect of misunderstood words.

1. Discover what a person alters.

In those areas which give Man the most trouble you will find the most alteration of fact, the most confused and conflicting ideas and of course the greatest number of misunderstood words. Take “economics” for example.

2. Find what came just before that.

The subject of psychology began its texts by saying they did not know what the word means. So the subject itself never arrived. Professor Wundt of Leipzig University in 1879 perverted the term. It really means just “a study (ology) of the soul (psyche)”. But Wundt, working under the eye of Bismarck, the greatest of German military fascists, at the height of German war ambitions, had to deny Man had a soul. So there went the whole subject! Men were thereafter animals (it is all right to kill animals) and Man had no soul, so the word psychology could no longer be defined.

3. Find the misunderstood word.

The earliest misunderstood word in a subject is a key to later misunderstood words in that subject.

4. Get it looked up.

“HCOB” (Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin), “Remimeo” (Orgs which receive this must mimeograph it again and distribute it to staff), “TR” (Training Drill), “Issue I” (first issue of that date), are the commonest misunderstoods. Because they occur at the beginning of an HCOB!

5. Get it used in sentences as long as it moves a meter tone arm.

Then come words like “a”, “the” and other simple English as the next words that often read.

6. End off on F/N VGIs.

In studying a foreign language it is often found that the grammar words of one’s own language that tell about the grammar in the foreign language are basic to not being able to learn the foreign language.

The ability to do it straight will have been returned.

The test of whether the person understands a word is “does it read on the meter as a fall when he reads the word in the material being cleared”.

It is very magical.

That a person says he knows the meaning is not acceptable. Have him look it up no matter how simple the word is.