Ally

Office anthropology™ Go Premium The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Ally
/ˈalʌɪ/ (n.)

Politics: Of a state, playground faction, or collective of some sort, to formally cooperate with another for a military or other purpose.

We are frequently invited these days to declare ourselves “allies”. But to “ally” is to take sides, which it to accept the premise that there is a side to take — that there is some kind of war going on.

The JC has a hard time accepting this premise — at any rate, not between the factions he is usually invited to suppose are at war, especially since he seems, by accident of birth, to have been lumped in with the one most of them feel they are at war against, so if there is a war (and let’s say it again: there doesn’t seem to be) then declaring oneself an ally for the oppo doesn’t seem an awfully smart move. I mean, do you know what the secret society senum pallidorum does to people who break its sacred oaths? These dudes don’t muck around, you know. They’ve been sacrificing virgins in a Bavarian castle since the fourteenth century.