Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Words I Wish We Used

[R Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

“Community hall” is a pretty nice substitute for “common house”, although it 
has a more formal, institutionally rigorous ring to it — something with which 
not all cohos would be comfortable.

But like anything else — banks, dentists, city councils, whatever — cohousing 
has its own lingo and jargon not immediately obvious to the civilians:  
“Cohousing”, “common house”, “common meal”, “consensus”, “sociocracy”, even 
“community”, are lacking in widely shared, determinate meanings — and might, in 
some audiences, trigger an early negative response.  But this may be 
unavoidable.  I’m not yet persuaded that the only words allowed are ones that 
everyone already knows, or that our prime audience is people who don’t want to 
learn new words and concepts.

So I’m not convinced we really have a problem here.

Thanks,
Philip Dowds
Cornerstone Village Cohousing
Cambridge, MA

PS:  For some urban cohos, like mine, the common house does indeed have 
families living in it.  It’s an apartment building with a really big and useful 
lobby.  Not a bad model ...

> On Sep 6, 2015, at 8:40 PM, Lynn Nadeau / Maraiah <welcome [at] olympus.net> 
> wrote:
> 
> I too find "common house" a term which is misleading to the uninitiated. It's 
> not a house which multiple families live in, a la commune. It's not even a 
> house. When referring to it, to visitors for example, I refer to it as our 
> "community hall". That takes care of the common ownership, and "hall" makes 
> people think of a meeting hall, a dining hall, a parish hall, a place for big 
> events, a place more public than a private home. Which pretty much covers the 
> territory. 
> 
> Maraiah Lynn Nadeau
> RoseWind Cohousing, long-built, in Port Townsend WA
> (where we are finally getting some rain)
> 
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