Discrimination against -oids

From Not Even Wrong, I see that the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris is holding a 3 month program on Groupoids and Stacks in Physics and Geometry. They have included an interesting overview of the subject to motivate the program. I have a particular soft spot for groupoids having studied the case for their admission into the paradise of mathematics in chapter 9 of my book. Groupoids had a strangely difficult childhood, finding acceptance surprisingly late, the oddest explanation for which is Connes' claim that:

...it is fashionable among mathematicians to despise groupoids and to consider that only groups have authentic mathematical status, probably because of the pejorative suffix 'oid'. (Noncommutative Geometry, 6-7)

Rather than this persecution of suffixes, a more common sentiment is that they are really just dressed up groups. In an old e-mail I have from Saunders Mac Lane he adopts just this line, perhaps surprisingly for the co-inventor of category theory, groupoids being categories with invertible morphisms, and very present in Mac Lane's home of algebraic topology.

Someone who had read my book made the good suggestion that I subject matroids to a similar treatment. Now I hear (penultimate comment by Srandby) that Mac Lane didn't like these either.

Once, Mac Lane came to give a talk. During the talk, in front of a packed audience, he stated that matroid theory wasn’t good or important mathematics, pissing off several faculty who worked in matroid theory. I found this comment to be very bizarre. Here was an advocate of a vast generalization of dubious importance dismissing a generalization of vector spaces that has tremendous importance.

Is there something to Connes' anti-oid theory?

Anyone who wants to take up the challenge of assessing matroids should take a look at Coxeter Theory: The Cognitive Aspects, an article by Alexandre Borovik. In section 13 - Combinatorics as non-parametric mathematics - Borovik claims:

The work of three generations of mathematicians confirmed that matroids, indeed, capture the essence of linear dependence. Since linear dependence is a ubiquitous and really basic concept of mathematics, it is not surprising that the concept of matroid has proven to be one of the most pervasive and versatile in modern combinatorics. (p. 23)

This book with Gelfand should no doubt be consulted too: Coxeter Matroids, Birkhauser, xiv+264 pp., ISBN 0-8176-3764-8 (with I. M. Gelfand and N. White), 2003.

I believe that Borovik will include the Coxeter Theory article in a book to appear with Springer. I read a draft of this book a couple of years back and found it wonderfully rich.