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third-person singular simple present co-opts, present participle co-opting, simple past and past participle co-opted
To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee. examples
To commandeer, appropriate or take over. examples
To absorb or assimilate into an established group. quotations examples
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, page 43
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
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