This has absolutely nothing to do with comics, but I wanted to comment on a couple of things I read in Sunday's Columbus Dispatch.
The first is a note of a linguistic nature to one Ms. Caroline Whitacre of THE Ohio State University (that should make Gordon Gee happy), who is quoted in an article on the possible impact of the looming mandatory federal budget cuts known as sequestration:
I'm pretty sure, in fact I'm fairly positive that "cooperativity" is not an actual word, at least not in English.
I find myself wondering if the writer of the article failed to realize this, or if she ran with the quote as she got it in the interest of journalistic integrity or objectivity or some other outmoded concept like that. (By the way, for those who may have trouble recognizing it, that last bit was sarcasm.)
I find myself wondering if the writer of the article failed to realize this, or if she ran with the quote as she got it in the interest of journalistic integrity or objectivity or some other outmoded concept like that. (By the way, for those who may have trouble recognizing it, that last bit was sarcasm.)
On the editorial page, I was shocked, and not in the Claude Rains in Casablanca sense, but genuinely surprised, to read bow tied conservative commentator and well known baseball fan George F. Will actually endorsing unashamedly liberal Ohio senator Sherrod Brown's notion that financial institutions that might be considered "too big to fail" should be broken up. This is clearly not easy for George. Witness the rhetorical gymnastics he performs in order to convince his conservative readers, and perhaps himself as well, that government stepping in to break up big businesses is actually perfectly compatible with the tenets of the Grand Old Party:
"By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives willl not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net, and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail."
Seriously, you don't often see someone bending that far backwards outside of a limbo contest.
Getting to what is ostensibly the topic of this blog, I did read the Sunday comics. Rather than launch into yet another diatribe about the sorry state of modern newspaper comics, I'll simply state that out of over 30 strips, only one elicited so much as a snicker from me, and it wasn't Judge Parker. It was, in fact, Agnes, by Columbus, Ohio's own Tony Cochran.
Before you get too much into a twist over the non-existence of the word "cooperativity" keep in mind that English is a fluid, living language that is remarkably adaptable. It is this adaptability that makes it the chief language used in international big business. If no word exists to meet one's communicative need, English has the ability to add a new word into its ever-expanding lexicon. For example, who could predict that "Google" would become a verb through common usage? In other words, don't misunderestimate your mother tongue.
ReplyDelete(You're not the only writer capable of sarcasm, mister!)