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Playing Fetch




 “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” is a sentence I learned purely from being on the internet. It was quite a while before I learned its context. To give you an idea how pervasive it is, I present here a Google search which I performed just moments ago: 



Search: stop try

Google Suggestions

  • stop try
  • stop trying to make fetch happen
  • stop trying to be god
  • stop trying to be god lyrics
  • stop trying to make fetch happen meme
  • stop trying to make fetch happen gif
  • stop trying to make fetch happen meme generator
  • stop trying
  • stop trying to make fetch happen meme template
  • stop trying to make fetch happen quote

Not quite sure how God got in there but that’s another story altogether.

I found myself contemplating this meme-able moment when I read a recent request on social media. Here are the relevant words:



…live closer to that area but willing to travel to Columbia/HoCo…

“Columbia/HoCo.” An actual sighting in the wild and I didn’t say it. 

At some point on the blog I took to using the term “Columbia/HoCo” to describe the whole shebang. It made sense to me at the time because, while we are all a part of the same county, I saw Columbia in many ways as being a distinctly separate entity within the county. It was deliberately created to be a certain way. The rest of the county evolved differently. The parts of Howard County that aren’t Columbia are more like eachother than like the New American City. That was my reasoning, anyway.

A year or so ago I began to wonder if that word choice was too arrogant and/or Columbia-centric. Perhaps I was smarting from a few too many accusations of “Columbia Privilege.” It occurred to me that Columbia/HoCo might give the impression to others that my entire world view was, “There’s Columbia, and then there’s everybody else.”

Rather like this famous New Yorker cover:



View of the World from Ninth Avenue, Saul Steinberg



Considering that the phrase never caught on in general local usage, this was basically a problem only in my own mind. If I had been hoping to work these words into the local consciousness, I had not succeeded. 

 Stop trying to make “fetch” happen.

Was it arrogant? Disrespectful? Narrow-minded? I didn’t know. I didn’t ask anybody, either. I simply stopped using it.

Former CA president Milton Matthews once told me that he used the term “Columbia and Greater Howard County.”  And I see that the Columbia Association uses those words on its website page about Community Partners. That feels really formal to me, somehow. When I try to imagine using that on the blog routinely it sounds more like a keynote speaker at a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

I’d prefer something more compact that is accurate and inclusive. Does it matter? 

If Language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done, remains undone.

- - Confucius

Well…it matters to me. 

Howard County and all its component parts is rather like the camel, famously known as a horse put together by a committee. But with us it’s more like several committees.

Who are we? What do we call ourselves? Ideas?

Let me know.









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