World Wide Words

The language of elections

In Britain, we have just emerged from the longest and most tedious election campaign in Britain this century, and yet the one that has had the most spectacular result. These events have provoked me into looking into the history of some relevant words.

In recent British parlance among parliamentarians and the public, the word politician has been pretty much a term of abuse, often a near synonym for “underhanded; dishonest”. This view is not new: from e e cummings’ “A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man” back to Shakespeare’s “Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not”, the breed has had a bad press. Indeed, one of the word’s first senses when it came into English—just at the right moment for Shakespeare to grab and use it—was “a shrewd schemer; a crafty plotter or intriguer”; the OED marks this as obsolete. But the word comes from the Greek polis, meaning the state and its citizens; in those times the meaning of politikos was nearer our modern sense of statesman, someone who puts the good of his country above all other considerations, rather than, as Harry Truman put it, “a politician who has been dead 10 or 15 years”. Whether the new Labour government will succeed in modifying or even removing this penumbra of meaning is too early to say.

The poll in which one casts one’s vote derives from an old Germanic word meaning “head” (a meaning which survives in some dialects). So a poll was just the process of numbering off heads in the days when people literally stood up to be counted at election time. Actually, in many English elections right down to the Reform Act of 1832 election was by acclamation, meaning that the candidate whose supporters shouted loudest got in; this practice was so unreliable in the crowded confusion of polling day that from the late sixteenth century onwards candidates began to demand a head count of those voting, and this is the true origin of the poll. The old sense of “head” survives in phrases such as poll tax, one paid by each person individually. This is a term with special historical resonances both in Britain and the USA (a proposed poll tax was the prime cause of the peasants’ revolt of 1381) which became so again in Britain in the late eighties. A local tax on individuals which was intended to replace an ancient and unfair property tax and officially called the Community Charge was renamed the poll tax by canny objectors who eventually forced its withdrawal.

The word election just comes from the Latin meaning “to choose; to pick out (from among a number of possibilities)”. At one time this could be used in phrases like “I elect Smith”, meaning that the speaker is casting his vote for, or choosing, Smith from among the candidates. A group term for those eligible to vote, the electorate, is extremely recent, being first recorded only in 1879; before then the usage was to refer to the electors. The right to vote is now called the franchise, but that word’s first sense in English in the thirteenth century meant “freedom, as opposed to servitude or subjection”; it gradually evolved through the senses of a legal immunity to prosecution, the granting of a right or privilege (hence another reduced modern meaning, of a right granted by an organisation to someone to sell its products within a given area), through the phrase elective franchise, a right granted by the sovereign to vote, to its main modern sense.

More: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/elections.htm