Efcharisto

The Phenomenology of "Thank You"

Say it with me.

Ef-chaaa-ryi-sto

Efcharisto.

Well done! You can now say “thank you” in Greek. You should feel proud. It's not an easy word. At four syllables long and with a unique permutation of phonemes, it doesn't roll off the tongue easily.

Not like “thank you” in other languages. In English, we've tapped out at two syllables that often get shortened to a simple “thanks”. Australians - not to miss an opportunity to trade nouns for nicknames - shortened it even further. Should the Melbourne laneway coffee barista yell at you "Takeaway away flat white on the bar!", all you need to reply is "Ta!".

Efcharisto, on the other hand, is a full bodied experience. The “Ef” originates in the lips, the “chaaa” comes from the back of the throat and the chest, the “ryi” somewhere near the forehead, and the “sto” requires two solid feet on the ground. Not only that, but it's so long that to say it to full completion requires intention and attention. Altogether, I find the phenomenoly - the phenomenon of experience - of saying efcharisto humbling every time I get to say it.

I suppose that's the point, right? To be humbled. To feel humility when you say “thank you”. After all, what are thank yous for? You should feel humility and gratitude towards the person or moment that has bestowed upon you whatever it is has been bestowed upon you. In this way, there is a co-occurence of embodied experience and semantic meaning present in efcharisto. The semantic meaning of “efcharisto” is grounded in its phenomenology.

This may seem like a trivial point to make, but it's actually quite profound. It reminds you that human creations, in this case a word, are not just external signifiers of subjective experiences, completely detached from those experiences themeselves. Rather, human creations can, at times, force the evocation of the signified phenomenon itself. As a more provocative example, the ancient Greek word for God is "Theos". The the ancient Aztec word for God is "Teotl". These two cultures never interacted, yet they arrived at a near identical combination of phonemes to refer to the phenomenon of God. This fact forces the provocative yet ultimately unanswerable question: was it the same God these two cultures were experiencing?

All this is to say is that there are more clues about meaning in design of the world around us, including language, than we may otherwise appreciate. For me, efcharisto is an opportunity to slow down, to intend, and to attend, which together facilitate the production of a more meaningful “thank you”. Now, for practice, to those of you who have made it this far in reading my travel posts, I say - with meaning - Efcharisto!