co-opt
verbUK /ˈkəʊˌɒpt/ · US /ˈkoʊˌɑpt/
Etymology From Latin cooptō (“to choose, elect”), from co(m)- + optō (“to opt”).
1
To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.
2
To commandeer, appropriate or take over.
- Artists' engagement with bleeding-edge tech will always have the potential to critique its destructive civil and military applications, as well as the potential to be co-opted by them—as propaganda or R&D—as the rise of the so-called knowledge economy has amply demonstrated.2009, chapter 2, in Josephine Berry Slater, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, editors, Proud to be Flesh, →ISBN:
3
To absorb or assimilate into an established group, movement, category, etc.
- In the resolution between the culture and the counterculture, it is impossible to tell who co-opted whom, because in reality the bohemians and the bourgeois co-opted each other. They emerge from this process as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos.2000, David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise […] , Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 43:
- Its opening track, Mastermind, offers one possible answer to a theoretical question about what prog rock might have sounded like in the highly unlikely event that it had co-opted Giorgio Moroder’s brand of electronic disco: nearly seven meandering, episodic minutes of unlikely chord changes […]2016 July 7, Alexis Petridis, “Roísín Murphy: Take Her Up to Monto review – still too strange for the bigtime”, in The Guardian:
- Derived terms
- co-optation, co-optative, co-option, co-optive
- Related terms
- recuperation