This year, our daughter moved to a new school. Leaving behind her 2nd-grade friends from the old school was heartbreaking for her. While ending the school year, she decided to write a thank you card to all the sixteen friends in her class. In her cards, she wrote something she found fascinating about that particular class friend and thanked him/her for the good times she had in their company.

One such card was for a kid who was the tallest in her class, so she wrote, “I love that you are so tall, you are like a stool. Thank you so much for your friendship. Will miss you”. I was with my daughter when she was writing all of these thank you cards. I thought I would not curate too much and ‘adultify’ this action of kid-like appreciation.

The following week, the mom of this tallest kid reached out to me and asked what stool meant. This mom is a Physician by profession and orders labs which sometimes include stool sample testing. So, it is only apparent that the first meaning of stool that came to her mind was poop. She was confused when she read this thank you card. Perhaps she was offended. I explained to her that the stool in this card meant – a seat, in our household we have sets of stools that are the tallest, and our daughter was drawing parallels between her kid and the tallest thing in our household. I apologized to this mom saying, that our daughter’s intention was pure appreciation, and sorry if this offended anyone. This mom got back to me saying, that as a parent, I should help my kid curate her cards, and closed the message by saying that parents are here to help kids! I thought to myself that even after I explained the logic behind the word usage, she was still holding on to some emotions that were driving this conversation negatively. I wished this mom and her family well without continuing any further. But this conversation left me thinking about Synonyms.

Synonyms, meaning the same word can have different meanings. They say that a human in their day-to-day communication only uses on average 500 words in any given language. It will come down to what Synonyms you use mostly use to define your communication style, and how your world is shaped by those words. Is our thinking so word bound that even with the highest degrees of education, we are not able to understand the intention? Has our education crippled our thinking? Is that the price we pay for being intellects? I then just made up a word called ‘Emnonym’.

In my dictionary, ‘Emnonym’ means the same word that creates different emotions. In this context, the word ‘Stool’, created two different emotions. Every emotion is valid from the user’s point of view. But how its interpretation creates the following interaction is to be determined by the user and the receiver. Perhaps it could lead to a great relationship or kill one. It could be a huge loss if the user has pure intentions, however, the receiver interprets it negatively. But then it comes down to how many synonyms one knows and how flexible one’s mind is to pick up the dictionary to understand the other meanings of the synonyms first. It will come down to one’s intentions. Are we too busy to understand the world around us? And assume that everyone is there to hurt us! I know we all got hurt by someone along the way, and because of that we might go into this alert mode time to time! Thus warding off the negatives coming our way, strategy being to be even more hurtful to others, this is called as survival strategy! But really the question I wonder is, is it a survival or a killing strategy? If we kill all the others around, then what is the meaning of life? Are we all trying to create a world, where the synonym of life now becomes Death?

A beautiful poem by Travis Snell:

I hope you’re taking good care of yourself, and prepping for a great holiday season ahead of us!

Best,

Chitu