Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today we're going to talk about election words and phrases, and then we'll look at the difference between homing and honing.
It's the time of year in the United States when campaigns are wrapping up and we finally cast our ballots.
So today we're going to look at the words and phrases we use to talk about elections.
Let's start at the boxing ring.
In the early 1800s, there's no formal registration process for fighters.
If you want to signal a challenge, you literally throw your hat into a ring, showing that you're ready to fight.
That's where the phrase we now use for elections comes from.
Throw your hat in the ring.
The boxing ring.
The phrase appeared in print by 1820 when poet John Hamilton Reynolds wrote about a boxer who would quote But it wasn't until 1912 that Theodore Roosevelt popularized the term's political meaning.
When a reporter asked him about his plans to challenge President William Howard Taft for the Republican nomination and Roosevelt declared The phrase caught fire and soon his campaign was selling pins and bandanas featuring Roosevelt's distinctive slouch hat surrounded by a ring.
And the metaphor makes sense.
Being a political candidate can be a tough fight, like stepping into a verbal or emotional boxing ring.
And what about that word candidate?
Well, in ancient Rome, if you wanted to run for public office, you didn't just announce your candidacy.
You wore it.
The word candidate comes from the Latin candidatos, which literally means clothed in white.
Roman men seeking election would wear a toga candida that was brightened with chalk to make it extra white.
According to Edamon Line, this gleaming toga symbolized the purity of a person's intentions in seeking office.
And doesn't that make you think of toga parties in a whole new way?
The Latin candidatus comes from candidus, which means bright white, and that in turn comes from the verb candere, meaning to shine.
This same root gives us the word candid, candle, and incandescent, all related to brightness and light.
By the time the word entered English in the early 1600s, it still referred to someone running for office, but it had lost its association with togas and chalk-whitened clothing.
If you already hold the office, you're a special kind of candidate, an incumbent.
This name comes from the Latin verb incumbere, which means to lie upon or to lean upon.
According to Edom Online,
The original English use of the word, starting in the 1400s, referred to someone who had the weight or burden of a church office lying upon them as a duty they had to bear.
Over time, the word expanded beyond religious contexts and came to mean the holder of any office, particularly a public office.
Once you are a candidate, toga or not, incumbent or newcomer, you have to campaign.
Today we think of rallies, advertisements and door knocking, but the word actually has a military origin.
Campaign comes from the French compagnie, which in turn comes from the Latin campus, meaning open field or plane which, you would correctly guess, also gives us the word campus.
Now, when an army would go into the field to conduct military operations, that was a campaign.
According to Edom Online, the word campaign entered English in the 1640s with this military meaning, referring to the time when an army was actively in the field.
But in the early 1800s people started applying it to politics and the campaign became the period when candidates would go out into the metaphorical field of battle to fight for votes.
As part of a campaign, candidates often give a stump speech.
This is another phrase that started in the 1800s.
Before formal stages and microphones were common, politicians in the United States would travel from town to town on the frontier to deliver their campaign speeches.
And they needed a way to be seen and heard by the crowd.
So their solution was often to stand on a tree stump.
Politicians would find a sawed-off tree, climb up on the stump to get above the crowd and deliver their speeches.
The stump became an impromptu stage and stump speech became the term for a candidate's standard campaign speech, the one they'd give over and over in town after town.
Edamonline says that in the eastern US and England the name stump speech tended to be sliding, and that seems to be supported by the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1820 from a publication called Letters from America containing observations on the climate and agriculture of the western states.
It reads, these harangues are called stump speeches.
We still talk about politicians being on the stump or stumping for a candidate when they're giving their canned talks or making their pitch to voters.
And when it's time to vote, you're making a vow or a pledge, at least etymologically, because the word vote comes from the Latin votum with that meaning.
In ancient Rome, a votum was a solemn promise often made to a god in exchange for a favor.
Over time, the meaning shifted from a religious vow to a pledge of support for a political candidate or position.
The word entered English in the 1400s, and by the 1500s it had taken on its modern political meaning.
When you cast your vote, you're making a pledge, expressing your choice.
And voters register those choices on ballots.
Ballot comes from the Italian ballota, which means little ball, because for centuries people voted by literally dropping small balls into a container.
For example, in medieval Venice, voters placed colored balls in urns for public lotteries and elections.
We started using the word in English in the 1500s and at first it referred specifically to those little balls used for voting.
But later it expanded to mean any token used in casting a secret vote, scraps of paper tickets or the printed forms we often use today.
And this also gives us the phrase blackballing someone, which originally referred to a voting method where you'd drop in a white ball for yes and a black ball for no.
And if someone received too many black balls, they were out.
If you vote in person, you will go to the polls.
A poll was originally the part of your head where your hair grows.
Coming from a Germanic word that meant the top of the head.
To take a poll was literally to count heads of people or sheep in the mid-14th century, according to Adam Online.
By the 1620s the word poll had extended to mean the collection of votes in an election, and the OED has the first use for a place where you vote in 1769, with this citation from the Annual Register quote The sheriffs opened the poll for a night of the shire for the county of Middlesex unquote.
Now it might feel like you're suffering when you stand in line for hours to vote, but suffrage has a different meaning when it comes to elections.
And even though the words sound a lot alike, suffer and suffrage are not related.
Suffrage comes from a Latin word that meant a voting tablet, a vote, or the right to vote.
In ancient Rome, suffrageum referred to a ballot or the act of voting in an assembly.
A suffragist is anyone who supports expanded voting rights.
The word suffragette, with its diminutive ette ending, arrived in 1906 as a sneer in the British Daily Mail newspaper for militant female voting rights activists, some of whom embraced the name enough so that it stuck.
All of these activities make up our elections, a word that comes from the Latin elegere, which means to pick out or to choose.
The lect part of the word is the same root we see in collect to gather together, select to choose from among options and even lecture.
Originally a reading or collection of words.
Election entered English in the 1300s and it's kept that core meaning the whole time the act of choosing someone for office.
So there you have it.
From medieval voting balls to frontier tree stumps, the words we use on Election Day carry centuries of history.
And if you're in the U.S., get out there today and cast your ballot.
Exercise your right to vote, to register your choice about the laws that will bind us and those who will represent us.
May their hearts be as pure as a toga candida.
Or heck, at this point, I'd be happy if they just weren't scoundrels.
A word of unknown origin from the 1580s.
Did the investigator home in on the suspect or hone in on the suspect?
If you had to think before answering, you're not alone.
Even professional writers get confused about this one sometimes.
So let's sharpen your understanding of when to use each phrase.
When you get closer to finding a difficult truth or tracking down a hidden criminal, you home in on them, just as a homing device helps you find something.
The idea comes from homing pigeons, those amazing birds that can deliver messages and then return to their roost.
They first got their name in 1866, according to Adam Online, and later in the 1920s, people started saying pilots were homing toward their destinations.
Merriam-Webster says it was 1955 when people started writing about homing in on things.
To remember that you home in on things.
Picture a homing pigeon arriving home to a lovely enclosure atop a grand castle like Windsor Castle.
The pigeon knows exactly where home is and flies straight to it.
That's how you home in on something.
You move directly toward your target.
Aardvark quickly homed in on the weaknesses in Squiggly's alibi.
Hone means to sharpen and comes from an Old English word meaning stone or rock.
Specifically, you hone a knife on a sharpening stone.
Think of it as a honing stone to remember that to hone means to sharpen.
They both have that N sound, and to hone on a stone rhymes.
You don't hone in on anything except maybe a sharp blade.
But you can hone your skills, your technique or your argument by making them sharper or more refined.
Squiggly honed his cooking skills in Montreal.
Merriam-Webster says it was 1965 when people started mistakenly saying hone-in, likely because hone and home sound so similar.
But even though some dictionaries now include hone-in, most usage guides consider it an error.
If you want to avoid criticism, stick with home-in, like our homing pigeon.
But if you think you'll still have trouble remembering the difference between home-in and hone-in, the American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style suggests using the phrase zero-in as an alternative to home-in.
To zero in is related to firearms.
When you adjust a gun's sights so bullets hit the target accurately, you're zeroing them, setting them to a reference point zero, from which all other adjustments are measured.
The phrase dates back to around 1944, becoming popular during World War II.
So when you zero in on something, you're focusing on it with the precision of a properly calibrated weapons sight.
And here's a cool aside.
I was asking my husband about guns and scopes while researching this and he told me that originally the crosshairs you see through a scope were made of spiderweb threads.
Now, that seemed too fabulous to be true, but from what I could find, it is.
Telescopes and gun sights used actual spider silk for crosshairs from the 1600s through World War II, because the strands were incredibly thin yet strong and visible, making them much better than metal wires or human hair, which were too thick.
Optical instrument makers even employed people whose job was to collect spider silk.
Eventually, etched glass replaced the spider silk, presumably putting thousands of arachnids out of work.
So to find something or focus your attention on it, you home in like a homing pigeon or zero in like adjusting a scope.
Save hone for sharpening, whether that's a knife or a skill.
You can remember home in by thinking of a homing pigeon on the roof of a castle and hone by thinking of sharpening a knife and saying you hone with a stone.
Finally, I have a familect story from Gary.
Hi, Grammar Girl.
My name's Gary, and I have a holiday-themed familect for you.
When my mother wrapped Christmas gifts, she always used a lot of tape two or three pieces on each side and several more on the end.
Consequently, as we sat around opening presents, it always took longer to unwrap hers.
People would say hold on a minute, this is a Grandma Betty gift or this one must be one of Grandma Betty's.
And now, years later, whenever anyone puts extra tape on a present, people will say you really, Grandma Betty'd that one.
And so even though she is no longer with us, her memory lives on every Christmas in our familect.
Bye.
Thank you for the call, Gary.
I love how familects help us remember people even after they're gone.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a special word or phrase you use with your family or a friend, elect that you use with your friends.
Leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
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And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of The Grammar Daily, a book of daily tips, illustrations and puzzles.
Buy a few copies today for all the language lovers in your life and cross them off your gift list early.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
Thank you.
