Word Power: Politics

Word Power will be a weekly (Thursday’s hopefully) course that is intended to teach you the etymology and construction of everyday words.  Etymology in short is understanding the origins of a word and how a word has evolved throughout history.  Today’s lesson is to understand the word politics and words associated with it.

Politics (Noun): [pol - i-tics]  The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.(American Heritage Dictionary)

Etymology

The word politics has its origins in Ancient Greece.  All of the cities in Ancient Greece, such as Athens, Sparta, and Corinth, were referred to as city-states and the Greek word for a city-state was polis (πολις).  The word acropolis is not just a clever name, the Greeks named all of the highest points in their city-states that because it literally made sense.  Our culture is not so different for we still see the word polis used today when cities, like Los Angeles and New York, are referred to as a megalopolis or metropolis.

The polis was a tight unit where citizens would be heavily involved in the affairs of the state.  All citizens were referred to as polites [pol-i-tes] and obviously this word was derived from polis.  Over time, anything concerning the state, would have some derivative of polis in it.  This was more than ever apparent when Aristotle wrote his Ta Politika, translated into “Affairs of the State”.

When Greece faded away and the Roman way took over Western Civilization, the Romans retained much of the language that the Greeks had employed.  However, Latin grammar was different than Greek grammar and in order to make Greek words fit into the Latin language, the endings had to be changed.  Thus the Latin word, politicus was introduced.  Politicus was an adjective that was used to describe anything “of the state”.  Therefore, the suffix -us would change dependent on the gender of the noun it was describing, such as in -us, -a, -um.  When the ending is dropped off, we are left with the stem politic and thus politics was born.

Summary

Endings of words have constantly changed the meanings of words throughout history and these changes led to the development of new words.  From Ancient Greek to Latin to Old French to Middle English, words may seem completely different, but in reality this is hardly the case.  The word politics is literally derived polis and thus anything in the state or anything involving the state is political.

Extra Credit

A politician is usually referred to as somebody that holds an office for the government.  Since we already know what the true definition of politics is, the only difference between politician and politics is the suffix -ian. The suffix -ian means related to or from.  So although you may hear of politicians, like Barack Obama, John McCain, etc; just remember that all citizens are considered to be politicians.

Image Used in Post

Athens-Acropolis image courtesy of Flickr user roblisameehan published under the CC license.