WORDSPEAK
Going to the polls - II
ANAND
THIS column is a continuation of the previous "Wordspeak" on terms related to electing a person democratically, by casting a vote. I have added explanations for some of the questions raised by readers, including one from Dharmeshwaran Natesan about "the demonology of the time" as it appeared in an article in The Hindu.
Political campaigns begin after the opinion polls have given the pulse of the electorate, and culminate in elections that decide who would be the butt of the ire of political cartoonists for some years to come. Politicians — for the want of a better word, those elected in the elections — have been an object, even if deserving, of demonising for a very long time. Jokes about them are taken for granted here in North America, as is the vilification of lawyers for their greed.
Demonisation of politics
Elected politicians as the central figure in the demonology (a set of beliefs which says that a particular situation or group of people is evil or wicked) of 19th and 20th Centuries came about after the early hopes of the 18th-Century pseudonymous writer "Junius": The right of election is the very essence of the constitution. Mary Ann Evans, who had to write under a pseudonym because she was a woman, wrote as George Eliot in Felix Holt (1866): "An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry." It was right down GBS's alley, or more appropriately, just his cup of tea, in "Man and Superman" (1903): "Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."
Psephology (see-fol-uh-jee), the study of elections and voting, and their statistical analysis in the prediction of results, does not tell us about demons, but about psephos (Greek for pebble) because ancient Greeks used pebbles as ballots to register votes in elections. Election comes from electus, the past participle of the Latin verb eligere "to choose", and the adjective elect meaning "chosen" has also become a part of the English language. Until 1600 the word "vote" was known only in Scotland and originally meant a "vow". It comes from the Latin votus meaning "vowed" or "desired", and this original meaning is preserved in the word devoted.
Greek origins
This jamboree of words connected with elections gets wilder if we consider that many of us do not cast our votes, or use ballots to register our votes, in this age of electronic, push-a-button voting. The ancient Greeks used pebbles for votes, which developed into dropping small balls into an urn. Usually this was to decide a simple yes/ no decision and white and black balls (ballots) would be used to signify the two alternatives. Literally, a ballot is a small ball. The -ot is a diminutive, quite popular with the French. In English it comes out as -et; piglet (a young pig), kitchenette (a small kitchen).
Such diminutives, in varied forms, are very commonly found in Indian languages. The practice of using balls for votes gave us ballots, and also the verb "to blackball" meaning to exclude or reject a person by means of dropping a black coloured ball. This was the forerunner of what is now called "negative" voting. Franklin Adams (1881-1960), an American humorist, put it succinctly: "Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody." Which meant, a few centuries previous to him, the urn in some cases had more black balls than white ones.
Stumping and husting
An election can take place by oral vote, where a vote of approval is expressed by a show of hands or applause rather than by ballot. Acclamation means a noisy or enthusiastic expression of approval for someone or something. Therefore, when Manmohan Singh won the post of Prime Minister by acclamation, he was chosen or elected not only without opposition, but also without a written vote. Other words derived from the same root are clamour, acclaim and reclaim.
An expression often used in countries with the British parliamentary-style governments is "hustings". For example: With only days to go before elections in Karnataka, candidates are battling it out at the hustings. In Britain, it used to refer to a platform from which (before 1872) candidates for Parliament were nominated and addressed electors. Now it is used in the wider sense of any place where campaign speeches are made, and of political campaign trail.
What politicians do at the hustings in India, other politicians do during stumping in North America. In the U.S., "to stump" means to travel the countryside during an election, giving campaign speeches, and "stumping" is to climb on to tree stumps to address the audience. The adjective "stumped" meaning at a loss or baffled evolved out of the difficulty in ploughing or planting a stump-ridden field or the likelihood of stumbling over a stump, and not — as some readers might think — from the dismissal of a batsman if the wicket keeper touches the stumps with the ball when the batsman is out of crease.
E-mail the author: anand@journalist.com
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