How we define community is important to our survival. The perspectives that we take on the community of others work for us or against us, against our own community.  One point of foreign language acquisition is to broaden one’s view of community by extending interaction with others.

Checking the definition from Dictionary.com, we could subscribe to what is generally agreed upon as a community or at least by definition.  I submit that this is a limited view, but a good place to start. What is your idea of community? Why does community matter? I propose that we agree to start here, with at least a general description:

community[ kuh-myoo-ni-tee ]

noun, plural com·mu·ni·ties.

1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2. a locality inhabited by such a group.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually preceded by the): the business community; the community of scholars.
4. a group of associated nations sharing common interests or a common heritage: the community of Western Europe.
5. Ecclesiastical. a group of men or women leading a common life according to a rule.
6. Ecology. an assemblage of interacting populations occupying a given area

Whoa!  It’s way too deep!  How about this: community, commune, commute, come, comic, communist, commutate… I’m not looking these words up in the dictionary, do we see any pattern though, relationship to an exchange or transfer, crossing over and over crossing, maybe?  Ok, so I couldn’t resist going out to do a “cheap” search on Google for the “commutative property of addition”… my husband is a mathematician so he speaks the language of numbers, it’s really the language of everything just about, at least in principle, the principle thought explained is best communicated in a visual format taken from https://www.google.com/search?

“We learned that the commutative property of addition tells us numbers can be added in any order and you will still get the same answer. The formula for this property is a + b = b + a. For example, adding 1 + 2 or 2 + 1 will give us the same answer according to the commutative property of addition.

I propose a community transfer, exchange, lets commutate culture… one that creates the properties of equality. it makes for a great formula…

Foundations to harmonious communications.