Esperanto

Friends: ESPERANTO…..

Esperanto…this strange word entered my vocabulary in 1985 and has been taped to my Atlanta office desk ever since. The desk cost $125 and came in three parts. It is constructed of Chinese sawdust and glue made from wood chips, and glazed over with some white acrylic plastic laminate, dissembling itself as expensive furniture you would expect a real estate tycoon to have. The desk, while cheap, is functional, but it’s mostly flash and little substance, and it might crumble if it were ever moved again. But it looks good! The word Esperanto is taped there as a constant reminder of some important things.

The term Esperanto was concocted in 1887 by a Polish eye doctor and linguist named Ludvig Larazus Zamenhof (great name, huh?) who wrote a book, Unua Libro under the pseudonym of Doktoro Esperanto. The word literally means “one who hopes” and was intended to be a universal second language to foster peace and understanding. Imagine: Peace and Understanding among 6-plus billion people! It has simply come to mean “an artificial language.” It might have gained wider acceptance had it been a Polish joke.

We’re having a national discussion in the US now on adopting English as a National Language, all the while gobbling some daily diet of amalgamated American slang. I suspect this is a move by the current majority to establish something that might promote unity before “we” in the majority become “we” in the minority. In time, however, the national language may be some combination of SpanRap or maybe a reversion to tom toms and smoke signals.

Esperanto has been tried before. Specifically, it followed hard on the heels of the evil-hearted antediluvian crowd that was wiped out by the Flood back over there in Genesis 6. It was attempted by the post—Flood pilgrims at Babel, who spoke one language and aimed to set up a world-class building program in an area currently occupied by Dubai. Genesis 11 reminds us of the consequences of that action, and it begs question: Can floods recur in the same place? Well, it makes for interesting reading. And today, Esperanto is alive and well, though artfully disguised, by the use of 0’s and 1’s algorithmically arranged in computers. We really speak one language these days. And the propensity to be artificial, and to deceive, has taken quantum leaps through this means of Esperanto. It’s Babel redux (Babel, interestingly, is a good play on words, meaning “to confuse”).

All this to say that the word Esperanto is a constant reminder of the artifices used in today’s universal culture to disguise ourselves and the real meaning of things…how artful we’ve become in deception. And it helps me contemplate with circumspection what I hear and read.

So I keep Esperanto posted on my shiny desk, a reminder to me that what is seen is not always what it seems to be. Living in a world of subjectivity, it’s real easy to be misunderstood, and clarity in communication these days is critical to peace and understanding. So here’s to Ludvig Lazarus in his attempt at unity, and may we hope the Heavenly Observer will withhold another Babel a little while longer while we try to get it right.