It’s hard to believe that 2009 is winding to a close. La miljaro (millennium, literally “thousand-year”) has seen its first decade, and now we find ourselves in the thick of the 21st Century. We’re at a pretty momentous point in world history, I think, and it calls for some New Year’s Resolutions that are thorough enough to merit being made at the decade’s end.

Be careful of the misleading Esperanto cognate rezolucio. While it does in fact mean “resolution,” it means the kind of resolution that a legislative body would pass – it is a motion, or a law, or some similar action. If you plan on making a resolution for la nova jaro, you want to use the word decideco.

Unlike rezolucio, the Esperanto term decideco refers to a decision, or a vow. It’s more appropriate for our purposes. Take a look at how the word is built. We see the infix -ec-, which addresses a noun form of an action. Then, there is the root decid-. You might have seen it as decidi, meaning “to decide.” As such, we have a word that means what we’re looking for – a decision, a thing we resolve to do.