WORDSPEAK
Going to the polls
ANAND
IT is the beginning of September, and for the next two months our North American media, perhaps the world, will be preoccupied with the presidential elections in the United States. Which means that we would be hearing and reading a slew of words mind-numbing times, an experience the Indian readers of "Wordspeak" went through only a short time ago.
This onslaught is generally spearheaded by that darling of politicians, the opinion poll. We are "polled", we express our opinions or preferences in "weekly polls", Americans will "go to polls" on the second Tuesday in November, and may be lucky enough to find that Bush "polled" only 17 per cent of the total vote. The last outcome, of course, would the luck of the electoral draw; reports indicate that both the presidential candidates are so closely tied that, statistically, it is equivalent to tossing a coin and having it come to rest on its edge.
Poll meant a head, and counting by heads has been an ancient and arithmetically simple way to determine how many of any one thing are there. A "poll tax" was a fixed tax levied on every adult (or head), irrespective of his or her income or resources. Polling humans now means keeping a score of their opinion, but cattle are "polled" when their horns are cut off, and a tree or a plant when its top is cut off. Cutting the horns or a part of an ear or branding the cattle is used to keep a record of one's herd. History tells us that some owners branded their human slaves; if that was polling, we may be sure that it wasn't to ask the slaves' opinion.
Capital words
Apropos of poll meaning a human head, I once shared my amazement with "Wordspeak" readers about the derivatives of Latin caput (head), one being capital. Although capital for "wealth" was first recorded in English in 1611, the reference to one's assets dates back to the times when a person's wealth was counted in the number of head of cattle that he or she owned. Capital crimes in English law were at first crimes for which the offender's head was cut off; its obvious derivatives are capital punishment and capital offence. The same sense of the word was also behind the letters of the alphabet "standing at the head" of a sentence or a name. A country's principal city with its seat of (or the head of) the government and administrative centre began to be called "the capital city" and then just "the capital".
White wearer
Once polls have given a hint of a country's mood, or even of a section of its population, candidates join the political fray hoping to share the spoils of high office, and their henchmen for the chance of dipping their hands in the trough. In Roman times, men standing for public office would wear white togas to signify their purity. One of the Latin words for white was candidus, thus the word candidate implies "white toga wearer". If one idea is an anachronism in modern day politics, it's to expect purity from the politicians; in fact, most of us would want them to wear feathers after they have been tarred.
The candidates canvass for votes. Canvass is a homophone, a word that is pronounced like another word (canvas) but has a different spelling or meaning. Canvas the fabric is made from hemp, cannabis in Latin, which was the source for the word. These two words share more than the same pronunciation. The original meaning of the verb canvass was "to toss [someone] in a canvas sheet". How it came to mean "to solicit votes" is anybody's guess; even the OED had to admit that the emergence of this sense of canvas is difficult to account for. The word meandered through history in the garb of various meanings: to agitate, to buffet; to criticise; to assault; to examine physically; to scrutinise, and to scrutinise fully so as to exclude bad votes. Canvassing as an act to solicit votes has been in existence for about 450 years, and only a historian can tell who was elected at that time by popular vote.
War campaigns
Serious and large scale canvassing is done through political campaigns. English campaign came from French campagne "open country"; what is called rural in India. It began as a military word, and referred to "army operations performed in a field or open country". It gradually came to mean also a series of planned activities — not necessarily in open country — that are intended to achieve an end: social, commercial or political. By the beginning of the 19th Century, its usage for "activities to get someone elected" was firmly established.
In the next "Wordspeak": sensational disclosures about election, ballot, vote and hustings.
E-mail the author: anand@journalist.com
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