General Semantics is a philosophical movement with self-help overtones that had its heyday in the 1950s. It had impacts in a few areas, including on science fiction authors of the era, but these days it mostly shows up among media ecology people like Neil Postman. I have neither time nor space to go into other aspects of General Semantics here.
One maxim of General Semantics that escaped into the popular consciousness, though, is, "the map is not the territory." When a general semanticist uses that phrase, they are often doing so metaphorically, where the territory is the human-experienced world and the map is human language.
I have a list in one of my notebooks with the title "What is Conlanging?" There are quite a few items on that list, but I think one answer to that question is "artistic mapmaking," where I mean "map" in the general semantics sense. In particular, this is a good characterization for a lot of my conlanging work, where I am interested in the contours that separate or group meaning in ways I find interesting or pleasing. My tendency to create the occasional word that has a complex definition in English is just a result of me drawing borders differently on, for example, my Kílta map of the human-experienced world.
