ORGY:meant secret rites

　　Dionysius was a god and giver of the grape and the wine.The grateful Greek held night festivals in his honor,and these often turned into drunken parties where the boys and girls danced and sang and violated all the sex laws.The Greek called

　　6. Political Terms and Their Origins

　　BALLOT: why we “cast” a ballot

　　The ballot we cast and the bullet we shoot were both balls at the beginning, but are descended from widely different parents. Bullet comes down to us through the French boulette, “a small ball,” from the Latin bulla, a “bubble,” “boss,” or “stud,” while ballot traces to the Italian ballota. “a little ball,” a word of Germanic origin. With us a ballot is sheet of paper we put a cross on and drop in a box on election day, unless we are dealing with voting machines. But the ancient Greek dropped a white ball of stone or metal or shell in a container when he favored a candidate, a black ball when he was against-which explains why the undesirable are still “blackballed” in our clubs. The ball we throw and bat around in our games has a closely related parentage as it comes from the same Germanic source as the Italian ballotta.

　　BALLYHOO: from county cork, Ireland

　　When you raise a lot of ballyhoo you are making a general fuss and pother. This all is thought to have grown out of a village called Ballyhooly, that lies east of Mallow in Cork County, Ireland. As the congressional Record of March, 1934, says: “The residents engage in most strenuous debate, a debate that is without equal in the annals of parliamentary, or ordinary discussion, and from the violence of these debates has sprung forth a word known in the English language as ballyhoo.”

　　BRIBE: a piece of bread

　　Many of the words that concern themselves with the idea of companionship or conciliation (including these two words themselves) have to do with the sharing of food. Bribe is such a word. In modern French, and in the plural, bribes means bits, odds, ends, and leavings, but in Old French it meant a lump of bread, or, as an olden-time author said: “A peece, lumpe or cantill of bread given unto a beggar.” The development of bribe seems to have been along the following lines: first a piece of bread, then begging, then living by beggary, then theft, and finally blackmail and bribery in the modern sense.

　　BUNK: a speech for Buncombe County

　　Around the year 1820 a debate was in progress in the House of Representatives on the complicated question of the Missouri Compromise. In the middle of the discussion a member from Buncombe County, North Carolina, arose and started a long, dull, and completely irrelevant talk. Many members walked out. Others called for the question. Finally the speaker apologized with the now famous statement: “I’m talking for buncombe,” which meant, of course, for his constituents in Buncombe which was a county in his district. According to the Niles’ Weekly Register, published in Philadelphia from 1811 to 1849, the phrase “talking to (or for) Bunkum” was well-known in 1828. We clipped the word to bunk, which now means inflated and empty speech or pretentious humbuggery. A colorful and expressive derivative of this word is debunk which came into use in the early 1920’s. The debunkers were first a school of historians in the years between Wars I and II who were popular for the straightforward and outspoken ways in which they stripped some of our heroic figures.

　　CANDIDATE: clad in white

　　When a Roman politician went campaigning he took care that his toga was immaculately white so that he could make the best impression possible. The Latin word candidates first simply meant “a person dressed in white” but later it took on the meaning that our word candidate has, a seeker after office. The root of candidates can be recognized in our word incandescent which means “white and glowing” and in candid, for a candid person, in the figurative sense is white and pure, and therefore frank and honest.