Daily Inspiration Quote by C. P. Scott

A clean little jab dressed up as etymology, C. P. Scott’s line works because it pretends to be pedantic while landing a cultural verdict. “Television?” opens like a classroom correction, the sort of fussy note an editor might scrawl in a margin. Then the joke tightens: half Greek, half Latin, therefore suspect. The logic is deliberately ridiculous, which is the point. Scott is mocking the way gatekeepers justify their unease with new media by reaching for “standards” that are really just taste, class, and control.

The subtext is less about language purity than about institutional anxiety. Scott helped shape modern British journalism from inside the cathedral: serious newspapers, civic duty, rational public debate. Television, arriving as a mass, domestic, image-first medium, threatened to reroute attention away from print’s authority. The quip turns that threat into a witticism, a way to maintain superiority while conceding, implicitly, that the new thing is unstoppable.

There’s also a sly Victorian hangover in it: the belief that mixed origins produce mixed morals. By framing “television” as a mongrel word, Scott hints at a mongrel culture - hybrid, commercial, entertainment-driven, harder to police. It’s not prophecy so much as posture: an editor’s way of keeping the high ground while the ground is moving.

Context matters, too: Scott died in 1932, before television became a household force. That distance makes the line sharper, not weaker. It captures the oldest pattern in media history: critics attacking the next platform with whatever vocabulary they already trust, even when the real argument is about who gets to set the agenda.