Every marketing text will tell you to choose a business name that is simple, easy to remember, and speaks to the purpose or function of the business. Writers tend to use their names. Not me. Well, not this time.
This is the first time that I have been able to choose the name that I want to be known by and I was a little bit thrilled at the thought! So, I went looking for a word that spoke to me. In my search I came to komunikas. I played with the pronunciation of it. Repeated it many times, aloud and in my head. Wrote it in cursive script and typed it on my keyboard. I loved it immediately. I had found my word.
I shared it with my family and friends. They kept straight faces, those lovely people were reluctant to dissuade me from my excited reveal, but they clearly didn’t connect with my obtuse, unfamiliar and strange word. My teenagers were eager to tell me about all the current slang it made them think of (none of it complimentary) and my colleagues wrinkled their noses and gently urged me to go back to the drawing board for something more suitable. My husband, who cannot say a bad thing about anything I do (bless him!) was the only one who responded with enthusiasm. Then he said, ‘I don’t get it though’.
Sigh.
Komunikas, pronounced kom-ju-NI-kus, means communication in Esperanto. I think. I hope!
Esperanto is a language I cannot speak, understand or read so I’m taking a bit of leap of faith that it means what Google tells me it means.
It is an auxiliary language created by Zamenhof to foster harmony and break down the barriers built by misunderstanding and the lack of a shared foundation. He intended for it to place people on an even and fair playing field where no-one had the upper hand.
I am a speech pathologist, a writer, a coach, and a manager. I have taught presentation skills and voice and fluency and I coach health professionals to be the best they can be, whatever they want to be. In my personal life I am a member of a close, loving family, some of whom dance on the autism spectrum, who hold many and varied opinions on the hot topics of politics, religion and race.
Communication, and miscommunication, are part of my every single day!
Another symbol I have long been drawn to is the Tower of Babel. The myth can be told in many ways but my take on the story is this.
Way back in biblical times all the people began to work together to build a tower up into the heavens.
God saw that they would succeed and clearly could not have that happen so he took away from them the one thing that made their incredible teamwork possible. He took away their common language. No longer able to understand each other the work began to fail and then stopped completely. People found those they shared a language with and retreated to their own parts of the globe. The united effort (the common brotherhood sought by Zamenhof when he created Esperanto) was thwarted in one fell godly swoop.
The Tower of Babel and Esperanto have become inextricably entwined in my mind for a long time now. They say that:
- Communication is the key to everything.
- If we can speak the language of another, together we can do anything
- The sky is literally the limit.
So, I had to ask myself, what is it you really want?
For many years I have had an email signature featuring the following three words. Educate. Empower. Enable. What can I say, I like a bit of alliteration! And I like what those three wishes encapsulate for me. Growth and learning and helping others. When I sat down to think about what I do these three concepts kept staring me in the face.
After many years of facilitating others – to speak, to swallow, to manage, to lead, to communicate – I found myself not well skilled in the art of understanding my own voice. I needed to start climbing back up the Tower.
The name ‘Esperanto’ translates into English as ‘one who hopes’ (Wikipedia).
I hope to communicate in a way that seeks to understand and learn and build and grow. That’s the tower I want to climb. That’s komunikas.
The answer to everything may be 42… but you can’t know that without communicating. Just sayin…