Samuel Hayakawa (1906-1992) was a Japanese-Canadian English professor who became an American citizen in 1954. He was also a politician—he served as a senator from 1977 to 1983—and he also wrote Language in Thought and Action (1949), a politically impassioned book on how words confuse.

The themes in Hayakawa’s work:

1. He popularized Alfred Korzybski’s map-territory metaphor.
2. As a man of Japanese ancestry who lived through the World Wars in Canada and America—the Japanese fought the Americans in the Second World War—he argued against conflict.