"Coopertition" Words

FIRST General Forum
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OK, I’m a bit of a language/linguistics nerd here, so you will have to bear with me, but:

We have “coopertition”, which is a major element of this years game, for the first time since 2012, and of course one of FIRST’s core values. It’s an etymologically nonsensical combination of “cooperation”, and “competition”, but this is English, so we don’t care about words making logical sense. But when we try to talk about coopertition, we run into a problem. We can say coopertition, but how do we say:

  • To engage in coopertition (cf. cooperate, compete)
  • One who engages in coopertition (cf cooperator, competitor)
  • Pertaining to or conducive to coopertition (cf. cooperative, competitive)

When I try to form these words, I get things like “coopertate”, “coopertator” and “coopertetitive”, although much of the time my tongue gets tangled and I give up.

Surely I’m not the only one who’s tried to use these words. What do you guys say?

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“coopertator”

Can you order that in a restaurant?

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I’ve taken to using “coopertitioning”.

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I really like Coopertate, Coopertator, and coopertative

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  • Do/Get coopertition bonus
  • Team that does/gets coopertition bonus
  • Overly focusing on qualifications. :yikes:
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Better yet, can coopertator tots be the new corn dogs?

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They’re certainly the easiest on the tongue, of the possibilities I can think of. (And all this talk of coopertator tots is making me hungry. Midnight snack anyone?)

They’re also kind of weird, because the only part coming from “competition” in any of them is the -t- in the middle. And my heart says that something good can be made out of “cooperpetitive”, even if I spell it differently every time I try to write it.

Going strictly logically, and taking the cooper- part from “cooper-ate” and everything after from “compe-tition”, and doing my best to make the result pronunciable, we get a set like “cooperete”, “cooperitor”, and “cooperetitive.”

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