Say goodbye to “hello”

I was in a meeting the other day when someone asked an Inuk lady what was Inuktitut for “Hello”.

She said there wasn’t one.

That their’s is an environment so harsh and their culture so dependent on mutual survival, that in meeting people [in the past] the word “hello”  did not even come into it… a superficial nonentity of a pleasantry.

Which, to me, illustrated beautifully that our perception of the world does not always match that of others.

Especially as the person asking the question of this lady was trying to insist there must be some form of greeting. To which the Elder struggled (while smiling) for some kind of answer that would fit into the questioner’s world, rather than their own.

Without teaching anyone in the business to suck eggs, folks in MRX could use an example such as this to explain to people outside of MRX that because they want Product X to mean Y to person Z – that this cookie cutter approach to human life and culture is not always so straightforward.