...are all real words. In a New York Times op-ed from this past Sunday, however, Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick cite their own coinage, Chimerica, and speculate about its potential demise:
A FEW years ago we came up with the term “Chimerica” to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy. With a combined 13 percent of the world’s land surface and around a quarter of its population, Chimerica nevertheless accounted for a third of global economic output and two-fifths of worldwide growth from 1998 to 2007.
We called it Chimerica for a reason: we believed this relationship was a chimera — a monstrous hybrid like the part-lion, part-goat, part-snake of legend. Now we may be witnessing the death throes of the monster. The question President Obama must consider as he flies to Asia this week is whether to slay it or to try to keep it alive.
The cartoon art accompanying the column, however, seems to be a hybrid of King Kong and Polyphemus, not lion, goat and snake...But of course the scientific use of the term Chimera is also attested; in fact it's in yesterday's Times:
A geep is not actually an offspring of the sexual mating of one sheep and one goat; rather, it is an animal resulting from the physical mingling of very early embryos of the two species and thus has four parents — two sheep and two goats. The scientific term for an animal with mingled cells from two species is chimera.
Yet another kind of Chimera? Just look at the Oct. 30 edition:
If history is a guide, then the recent suicide bombings in Baghdad show that the insurgency in Iraq is far from over.
Contrary to much of what is written and said, victory is not near and the notion that the “surge” of troops was some great, decisive military action that set the stage for political reconciliation is a chimera.
It was a chimera for the French in Algeria that their bloody counterinsurgency there defeated Algerian nationalists.
After the war, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, a myth started to build in the French Army and then found its way into American Army thinking, where it lives on today, that the French military operations defeated the insurgents.
Not true. In fact, the Algerian insurgents chose to lay low while the French Army and people impaled themselves on the political problems of colonial rule. In the end, President Charles de Gaulle ordered the French Army out of Algeria in 1961 and Algeria got its independence.
Wow...imaginary monsters, coupled with references to myth and self-impalement! That's why they call it the paper of record.
Final question: Which of these meanings was the "Chimera Investment Corporation" thinking of? One hopes it's not a place where, with Jonathan Swift, one might say, "Rise by merit to promotion; Alas! a mere chimeric notion." [Thanks to OED for that one.]
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