Word Stories: ballots, not bullets

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

As I write, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still neck and neck in the race for the Democratic Party nomination. As people cast their ballots in this contest, which focuses in part on what America plans to do with its bullets, I’m reminded of the common bit of political wordplay that links ballots and bullets. Abraham Lincoln, for example, said ‘the ballot is stronger than the bullet’, and many others since have linked them together to express a preference for voting over shooting. It’s not surprising that they go together so well in English because they both derive from similar roots.

Ballot comes from Italian ballotta, a diminutive of balla (ball). In early forms of voting, people dropped small balls into a box or urn to indicate their preference, in some systems using a white ball to signify agreement or a vote for a candidate and a black ball to signify dissent or a vote against a candidate. From this, we get the idea of blackballing someone (excluding them from a club or other society). It’s worth noting in passing that the word candidate comes from Latin candidus (white) after the white togas that people standing for office traditionally wore. The adjective candid (open, sincere) came about through association of the ideas of whiteness and purity with honesty and sincerity. Of course, the extent to which candidates are candid may vary somewhat.

The diminutive ending -ot isn’t very common in English, but it does exist in one or two other words, such as parrot. Although it’s not certain, this word seems to be derived from Perrot, a diminutive of Pierre.

Bullet is also a diminutive of a word for ‘ball’. It comes from the French boulette, a diminutive of boule (ball), itself derived from Latin bulla (bubble, round object), and has appeared in its modern form in English since the middle of the 16th century. Boule also gives us bowl (in the sense of the games of bowls and bowling).