Although the classical societies of ancient Greece and Rome have vanished, Greek and Roman thought is very much alive in the parlance of politics. As the joke goes, the etymology of the word politics derives from poly, “many,” and tics, which are blood-sucking parasites. In truth, politics issues from the Greek word polities, “city, citizen.” Politics may make strange bedfellows, but, as we shall see, politics makes for even stranger, and sometimes colorful, vocabulary.
The story behind the word inaugurate is an intriguing one. The word literally means “to take omens from the flight of birds.” In ancient Rome, augurs would predict the outcome of an enterprise by the way the birds were flying. “To augur well” means “to prophesy favorably.” Augurs (the first “early birders”) were also known as auspices, whence our word auspicious, from the Latin avis, “bird” + specere, “to observe.”
These soothsayers, magicians, and priests would tell a general whether to march or to do battle by the formations of the birds on the wing. They might even catch one and cut it open to observe its entrails for omens. Nowadays, presidential candidates use their inauguration speeches to take flight on an updraft of words, rather than birds—and they often spill their guts for all to see.
The verb to ostracize means “to exclude from a group by popular consent,” and hidden in that verb is an oyster. Rather than clamming up and floundering, just for the halibut, let’s go fishing for the origin of ostracize. Oysters were a staple of the ancient Greek diet, and the verb to ostracize descends directly from ostrakon, the Greek word for an oyster shell and also for a broken piece of pottery. In ancient Athens, the people could banish a politician by popular vote. Citizens gathered in the market place and wrote down the name of the undesirable on a tile or potsherd. If enough votes were dropped into an urn, the “winner” was sent from the city for either five or 10 years. Because the shards of pottery resembled oyster shells, they were called ostraka, whence our verb for general exclusion.
Thomas Nast (1840-1902), perhaps the most famous political cartoonist in our history, was responsible for the popularity of two-party animals. Nast made a donkey the recognized symbol of the Democratic Party when one of his cartoons appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1870. Four years later, in the same magazine, Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion’s skin, scaring away all the other animals at the zoo, including the elephant which he labeled “The Republican Vote.” That’s all it took for the elephant to become associated with Republicans.
Horses and horse racing are dominant animal metaphors that gallop through political life. One of the earliest of equine metaphors is “dark horse.” The figure refers to a political candidate who is nominated unexpectedly, usually as a result of compromise between two factions in a party. Dark horse candidates who became president include James Polk in 1844, Franklin Pierce in 1852, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, James Garfield in 1880, and Warren G. Harding in 1920.
Presidents always have running mates. This too is a horse racing term and derives from the practice of one owner or one stable running two horses in a race, the slower one being put in there to pace the star. The pacesetter was known as the star’s running mate. The phrase has been around for more than a century, but its use to define a vice president was coined by, of all non-practitioners of slang, Woodrow Wilson. At the Democratic Convention in 1912, the presidential nomination went to Wilson on the 46th ballot after a terrific brawl. Governor Wilson of New Jersey announced that his vice-presidential choice would be another governor, Thomas Marshall, and announced, “And I feel honored by having him as my running mate.” Wilson’s turn of phrase brought down the house, the only squeak of humor those assembled had ever heard out of Woodrow Wilson.
Presidential jockeying for position gets out of the gate earlier and earlier with each campaign. It remains to be seen whether the next presidential contest will turn out to be a runaway or a real horse race. Will a dark horse give the frontrunner a run for their money? Will the old war horse and their running mate, saddled with international and economic problems, turn out to be shoo-ins or lame ducks?