The opposite of progress—deconstructing the pun
A joke (sorta lame but, whatever) that has been going around on the internet since ages (if pro is the opposite of con, what’s the opposite of progress?) was finally picked up and printed on the front page of Mumbai Mirror, in light of today’s civic body elections, thus ensuring that the handful of people who hadn’t heard it earlier are now aware of it. The grammatical mistake (IT shouldn’t have been there) and the bad spacing (you need a space after the comma) notwithstanding, a lot of people would find it decently funny, so I thought I would take this opportunity to write a bit about this pun, so to speak, from a linguistic angle, because, well, that’s what Linguistrix is all about.