RAH used the word "evalued" in the long version of Stranger. Here's the sentence: "Jubal honestly evalued anything that happened to a theologian short of breaking him on the wheel was no more than meet..." (Page 392).

What does "evalued" mean?

I'm thinking typo but I've not coming up with the correct word...

No evalue, but two possibilities exist.

Evaluate

but more likely, after looking these up at merriam-webster.com is

Value, verb, in the sense of 1: b:

Value, verb, from merriam-webster.com

1: a : to estimate or assign the monetary worth of : appraise <value a necklace>
b : to rate or scale in usefulness, importance, or general worth : evaluate

2: to consider or rate highly : prize, esteem <values your opinion>

I suspect that in Stranger, Jubal was assigning a somewhat low rating in "usefulness, importance, or general worth" to theologians.

[At least that's how I have read it over the years {without noticing the "evalued"}.]

"Evalued" would certainly not be the first new term coined in Stranger. I kinda like it. I think I'll start using it in my daily correspondence. "John, I have reviewed your proposal, and have evalued it to be less than acceptable."

I wonder -- and perhaps David Wright could advise us -- could this be a General Semantics usage? I construe it as a root of 'evaluate" and "evaluation"; since evaluate has come to have a rather more specific meaning, in the sense of analysis, this feels to me like a coined general term that would be possibly something like "judge fundamental moral worth." Or something.

A cursory search of the literature of General Semantics did not turn up any usages of the term 'evalue' whereas 'evaluate' occurs in almost every document that I have.

To quote Heinlein, "Semantics is simply a study of the symbols we use to communicate. General Semantics is an extension of that study to investigate how we evaluate the use of those symbols. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know."

To evaluate the use of symbols means to understand the symbol in as wide a context as possible. Words have infinite-valued meanings depending on many, many factors.

Evaluation is not restricted to symbols but includes our perception of all events, which we experience.

An example comes from Beyond This Horizon

Mordan suddenly whipped his sidearm clear, aimed it at Hamilton. Hamilton had his own out and had Mordan covered at appreciably the same instant. He returned it at once. Mordan laughed and replaced his own. “I was in no danger,” he declared. “I knew that you could draw, evaluate the situation, and decide not to fire, before a slower man would see that anything was going on.”

I find no use of the terms 'evalue' or 'evalued' in any of the passages of his works that I have documented.

I suspect that the quoted usage was a mis-print.

I found that on page 392 in my copy (thanks again, Dan), which is the Ace/Putnam "For the first time the original uncut" hardback edition of SiaSL (sorry about the FLA, holmesIV, but after mumble years on a.f.h using it is inbred). It is on the second page in at the beginning of "Part Four - His Scandalous Career - XXX". We could determine relatively quickly if it is a typo/misprint if others could check their copies of other editions, HB/PB, cut/uncut. Unless someone wants to check the cut/uncut MSs in the Heinlein Archives to provide the definitive word on the word that was in them.

Piggybacking to David Wright,

By coincidence, the next RAH book up in my rereads is BTH. Prolly start it within a week or so.

Here are two usages of the term 'evaluate' from SIASL.

“I was part of the group that proposed ending the ‘Masquerade.’ I was wrong. I believed that the great majority of our fellow citizens, reared under modern educational methods[1], could evaluate any data without excessive emotional disturbance."[Heinlein TPPT, p. 626]

"The important differences between the two cultures went much deeper than engineering technology. Although ubiquitously friendly and helpful the Jockaira were not human. They thought differently, they evaluated differently; their social structure and language structure reflected their unhuman quality and both were incomprehensible to human beings."[Heinlein TPPT, p. 730]

I didn't mention it in my earlier post, but the 'evaluation without excessive emotional disturbance" is an important part of GS. This is the so-called 'thalamic pause' through which the GS practitioner filters his evaluation through what Heinlein called the 'cool' part of the brain, the cortex, rather than relying strictly on the thalamic reaction.

Heinlein practiced an extreme version of this when he purposefully postponed reading any of the 'war news' for several weeks so as to dilute the emotional impact. He mentioned this in a letter to John Campbell.

[1] For what he considered 'modern educational methods', look at Phyllis's training of Theobald in BTH and the extensive discourses in FUTL.

Aren't those examples from Methuselah's Children?

True, but, for convenience, (I didn't have searchable versions on most of them), I took most of my Future History references from a single source, The Past Through Tomorrow collection.

In my book, each of the major Future History stories is covered in its own separate chapter under that general heading, making it unnecessary to reference the name in the source attribution for each quote.

I should have remembered that and changed the attribution accordingly.

I apologize.