E-Prime is the English language, with all forms and uses of the verb "to be" omitted. It was invented by David Bourland for reasons connected with General Semantics. Very roughly and briefly: According to General Semantics, there are certain habits of thought which, it is argued, are conducive to misevaluation of the world, and generally un-sane functioning. They may be summed up as "identification" or "unconsciousness of abstraction": the failure to distinguish words from the things they refer to, concepts in one's mind from things out there, inferences from the data they are based on, value judgements from inferences, etc. In English, identifications are often expressed using the verb "to be", and "to be" is often used to express identifications. The two do not coincide, but there is a large overlap. Hence E-Prime, which by blocking the natural way one might express such identifications, forces one to think more carefully about what one really wants to mean.