Exactly where and when did Russell F. W. Smith say, "Man comes pretty
close to living in the house that language built"?
  I need primary reference--where and when he said it-not someone else
quoting him.   Google website has several references that note Smith
says this, but no one gives specifics.  Answer must be exact and
verifiable.

Hello.

The quotation is from a paper that Russell F.W. Smith delivered before
the Fourteenth Annual Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of
America, held at Bloomington, Indiana, on August 1, 1952.

The paper was entitled, "Linguistics in Theory -- And in Practice,"
and was subsequently published in the Autumn 1952 issue of the journal
"ETC.: A Review of General Semantics" (beginning on page 46).

Here is the entire paragraph that includes the quotation:

"Since the concepts people live in are derived only from perceptions
and from language and since the perceptions are received and
interpreted only in the light of earlier concepts, man comes pretty
close to living in a house that language built, located by maps that
language drew, and linguistics is -- or should be -- one of the
sciences most useful in extending the limits of human knowledge
(inquiry, research) and in extending knowledge to humans (education).
In thinking about the basic dilemmas of our culture, there would seem
to be no more important science than linguistics."
Source:
Russell F.W. Smith, "Linguistics in Theory -- And in Practice"
ETC.: A REVIEW OF GENERAL SEMANTICS, Volume X, Number 1, Autumn 1952,
p. 46.


search strategy:
Using a library database of academic journals, I located a reference
to the Russell Smith quotation in a 2002 issue of ETC.: A Review of
General Semantics. The 2002 article was entitled, "Fifty years ago in
ETC."  From this title, I deduced that the quotation must have
appeared in a 1952 issue of ETC.  I subsequently made a trip to a
local academic library where I viewed the 1952 issues of ETC. on
microfilm. Eventually, I located Smith's paper on page 46 of the
Autumn '52 issue.


I hope this helps.

Outstanding!  Thank you so much for finding this reference so quickly!
 I will have to verify the answer myself, but seems like that should
not be difficult, thanks to the work of your juggler-ga.