Why conate instead of donate?
Because they are different by more than a letter.
You donate to charity.
You conate to things you have found of benefit to you.
You are walking to work one day. There is a guy on a street corner, hat on the ground, playing the sax. If he is skreetchingly awful and you can’t wait to get away, but you drop a buck in his hat anyway-you have donated. If he is really good, and you would like to linger, and it has enhanced your day, when you drop a buck in his hat-you have conated.
One way or another you pay Microsoft, Apple and Google.
You donate to Goodwill, The United Way and starving children.
You conate to NPR, Wikipedia, Mozilla and me(us).
Although sometimes you can just buy from us.
So many people are putting so much out there for us to use and enjoy–and we are not compelled to pay for it. But we can. To do so becomes and act of volition, a purposeful act.
I have become more and more aware of the difference between giving to charity and contributing to resources I am using and enjoying. While not compelled to pay, nevertheless I have to acknowledge my debt to those who have been providing me with tools, resources and art. I am in awe of their efforts.
“The laborer is worthy of his rewards”
I have come to the decision that I can and I will support this movement. I will support it in individual instances and as a whole. I will support it monetarily and otherwise as much as I can.
I will conate.
How I stumbled upon conate (no, I did not entirely make it up) is interesting.
Looking for an alternative to donate I got into the online Thesauruses. A synonym for donate is ante/ante up. Which is more at what I was looking for but…. A synonym for ante up is chip-in. A synonym for chip-in was conate.
Conate?
I find no dictionary definition for conate. Not online. Not in Websters Unabridged. Not in the OED.
There are entries for conation. Conation has to do with volition and purposeful action. All to the good.
The context of conate is good.
Conate itself seems to be a word awaiting a definition. So here I am involved in a linguistic and lexiconic experiment, defining conate to mean what I want.
conate v. 1) to purposely contribute to a benefit received when under no compulsion to do so.
My bigger boy says I should do a Wikipedia entry. Maybe. Probably not. Not right now anyway. Let me think about it.
The conate/AnteUp button is release under the Creative Commons Zero license (cc)(0) which is Public Domain.
Actions:
1) Share with everybody you know.
2) Buy product:
You can shop for an item or more at: Zazzle. It specializes in on demand printing.
Zazzle‘s default markup is 10%. We are going with that. So if you spend $4.00 we make about 40¢.
3) If you bypass our ‘shops’ and go to local (or other internet) producers, please conate.
And share your experience with us.
Remember–you can not sell anything, even as a fund raiser, without additional permission.
If you wonder why we don’t stock inventory, read all about it at VoteGlyph.
4) All of the above.