Some Political Terms We Get from the Romans

“Julius Caesar was therefore compelled to invade Britain again the following year (54 BC, not 56, owing to the peculiar Roman method of counting), and having defeated the Ancient Britons by unfair means, such as battering-rams, tortoises, hippocausts, centipedes, axes and bundles, set the memorable Latin sentence, ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici,’ which the Romans, who were all very well educated, construed correctly.

The Britons, however, who of course still used the old pronunciation, understanding him to have called them ‘Weeny, Weedy and Weaky,’ lost heart and gave up the struggle, thinking that he had already divided them All into Three Parts.”

Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman, 1066 and All That (1931)¹

 

Look, the Roman Forum! The word ‘forensic’ comes from the Latin forensis, meaning to do with the forum, because that’s where legal business took place. See, bonus etymology for you there.

1) Candidate

The word ‘candidate’ shares its origin with the similar-looking ‘candid’, a fact which may surprise you given the notorious tendency among candidates standing for political office to be anything but candid. Still, both words derive from the Latin word candidus, which means ‘white’, specifically a bright, clear, dazzling white, as opposed to the slightly duller colour implied by Latin’s other word for white, albus (famously employed by J. K. Rowling as a forename for Professor Dumbledore²). The clarity and purity of colour expressed by candidus was sequently expanded to mean clarity and purity of character, hence an idea of honesty and sincerity whence we derive our English adjective ‘candid’. But what about ‘candidate’?

Well, the adjective candidus has a related verb candido, meaning to make (something) the kind of white colour to which the adjective refers. The perfect passive participle from that verb, i.e. meaning (as a substantive) ‘one who has been made dazzling white’, is candidatus, a word which was used to describe someone who had put on a lovely new dazzling white toga in order to stand for a political office. (Since the toga was basically Roman national dress, one would definitely wear one when putting oneself up for a role in running the state. Indeed, wearing a toga was to some extent synonymous with political involvement, to the point where I remember reading something in a Latin class in which an individual was said to have excelled in both ‘Mars and the toga’, meaning both military affairs and civic ones.³) Our English derivative ‘candidate’, of course, is used to refer to someone standing for a political office whichever colour he or she happens to be wearing.

2) Ambition

So if one has decided to become a candidate for a political office, what’s next on the agenda? Well, garnering a few votes would seem like a pretty good idea. And this is Ancient Rome we’re talking about, so you can’t win the populace’s favour with tweets, television appearances, or even tabloid interviews: you’re going to have to actually physically walk around and speak to people. (I’m sure we’re all very aware that this method of making oneself known to the electorate has not yet entirely died out.)

The Latin word ambo means ‘both’. Combine that with the verb io meaning to go and you get ambio, meaning at its narrowest and most literal to go around both sides of a thing, and consequently in more usual usage generally to go around. This then leads to the idea of going around canvassing for votes. Now stick a nice abstract-noun ending on that and you get ambitio, the act or practice of going around, most likely in the context of canvassing for votes. So by engaging in this kind of ambitio, one was demonstrating one’s aspiration to get voted into political office and so move up in the world, such that the word became synonymous with such an aspiration – hence the sense in which we tend to use the word ‘ambition’ in English today.

3) Manifesto

We actually got this word via the later Italian, which explains that ‘-o’ suffix that looks a little bit odd in English, but it still has a fun Latin etymology and so I thought I’d include it. The Latin word manifestus is a combination of the noun manus, meaning ‘hand’, and a verb fendo, which had already dropped out of use by the time Latin-speakers started writing things down, but which survived in a number of prefixed forms like defendo (whence the English ‘defend’) and offendo (whence the English ‘offend’). The general idea contained in fendo was one of hitting something, which you can probably get some sense of from these prefixed forms. Then the ‘-nd-’ part of the root, according to nice (usually) reliable Latin grammar rules,⁴ got swallowed up by an ‘-st-’ when the perfect passive participle was formed, and hence manifestus’ most basic meaning is ‘(having been) hit with the hand’. Now, if one can hit something with one’s hand, that means it’s tangible and palpable; its existence is evident. This is where we get our English adjective ‘manifest’, meaning perceivable or obvious.

From manifestus came the verb manifesto, that is, to render something manifestus – tangible and obvious – namely to make it available to the public. A manifesto is therefore what has been made public, and more specifically in our English usage a list of policies that a political party has made public so that we the electorate might scrutinise them.

So, even if candidates are rarely candid, if ambition involves far too much going around bothering people, and if every manifesto that was put forward before Thursday’s election struck you as containing nothing much that seems obvious and as likely to collapse if hit with a feather, let alone a hand, at least you now know more entertaining Latin etymologies than you did.⁵ And if entertaining Latin etymologies can’t cheer up a person feeling in a bit of a state about the state of the state, I must say I can’t imagine what can…

Footnotes

¹ My thanks go to the kind human who has uploaded the text of this altogether hilarious book to the following web address: http://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/c1066.htm.

² Fancy hearing an elaborate and disturbingly convincing fan theory to the effect that Dumbledore created a Horcrux? Thought so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do20JDmfFQw.

³ A cursory online search failed to yield the reference and frankly I have better things to do with my time than obsess over tracking it down; please just take this one on trust.

⁴ I learned Latin via the Cambridge Latin Course, https://www.cambridgescp.com/, which, although stupendously good fun, is not exactly very grammar heavy, so of late I have tended to be more struck by the rules which can be solidly applied to Latin grammar than the exceptions.

⁵ My primary resource for this blog post, aside from my own fuzzy rememberings, was the excellent Word Study Tool available on the Perseus website: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search.