Where do our election words come from?
A candidate is dressed in white. A ballot is a little ball. A vote is a vow. Almost no election word means what you would guess.
Every election season the same handful of words fills the air, and almost none of them mean what you would guess. Hidden inside them are men dressed in white, small coloured balls, counted heads, whispered vows, and a priest squinting at birds. The ballot box turns out to be one of the most crowded museums in the language.
The man in white
Start with the candidate. In Rome, a man running for office wore a specially whitened toga, the toga candida, rubbed bright with chalk so that he would look clean and pure in front of the voters. That white robe gave him his name: candidatus, “clothed in white,” from candidus, “shining white.” The same gleam survives in candid, meaning frank and with nothing hidden, in candour, and in the candle and its incandescent glow, a whole family that lights up at once. A candidate is, quite literally, the man in white, doing his best to look spotless. Little has changed but the fabric.
The vote itself
To vote is, at the root, to pray. The Latin votum meant a vow or a solemn wish, from vovere, “to vow,” the very word that also gives us the votive candle, the devout, and devotion. When you cast a vote you are, underneath, making a wish and swearing to it.
And you once did it with a ball. Ballot comes from the Italian ballotta, “little ball,” because Venetians voted by dropping small balls into a box, one colour for yes and another for no. The habit survives in blackball, to shut someone out with a single dark token.
The place you do it keeps its own old arithmetic. A poll was, first, a head, the top of the skull. To go to the polls is to be counted by the head, one skull at a time, which is also why a tax charged per person was a poll tax.
Choosing, and the chosen
An election is a picking-out. It comes from the Latin eligere, “to choose, to pick,” built on legere, “to gather or select.” Choose carefully and tastefully and you are elegant; choose the very best and you have the elite, which is the same word as elect in French clothes. The winners and the choosing that made them grow from a single root.
The contest itself wears Greek dress. Democracy is demos, “the people,” plus kratos, “power”: rule by the crowd. That same demos gives us the demagogue, once merely a “leader of the people” before the word curdled into the rabble-rouser we mean today.
A battlefield and a ship
A campaign sounds like advertising, but it began on a field of war. Campus was Latin for “open field,” and an army’s campagna was the season it spent marching and fighting in open country. Politics borrowed the word whole, so that every campaign is, at the root, a military march, complete with its champion, another child of campus: the fighter who takes the field.
And to govern is to steer a ship. It comes from gubernare, to pilot a boat, itself from the Greek kybernan, “to steer,” which three thousand years later also gave us cybernetics. Government is the art of holding the tiller of the state and trying not to run it aground.
The birds must approve
The strangest of them all is inauguration. Before Rome would install a new leader, a priest called an augur read the omens, chiefly by watching the flight and the cries of birds across a marked patch of sky. Only if the birds approved could the office be filled. To inaugurate was to seat someone after the auspices had been taken, and auspicious, from auspex, “the one who watches birds,” remembers the same ritual. Every modern inauguration, for all its flags and podiums, carries in its name the memory of a man staring at the sky, waiting for a good bird.
The ones that keep their secrets
A few election words hold out to the end. Nobody is quite sure where caucus came from, whether an old Algonquian word for a council or a Boston club of ship’s caulkers, and the honest answer is that we do not know. But most of the ballot box gives itself up: white togas, little balls, counted heads, whispered vows, a field of war, a ship’s wheel, and a sky full of birds. We think we are being modern when we vote. The words know better.
The Monthly Lemma follows one everyday word a month all the way back to its root, then posts the whole story to your door. One word, and the world behind it.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.