Psephology

With the election over, Australians can breathe a sigh of relief from both combative candidates and the attendant psephologists, i.e those who make it their business to study election trends and analyse election results. Psephologist was first used in 1952 as a self-deprecating joke by a British political scientist, David Butler, in his introduction to an analysis of the 1945 General Election. The word’s curious root pseph-  is the Greek word for “pebble”, which was in fact used in the voting system of ancient Greece. Voters declared their support for a decree with a white pebble, and their dissatisfaction with a black pebble. A decree which was supported by the majority became a psephisma.
Psephology thus has honorable connections with earliest form of democracy, though its contemporary uses do not feel much like the rule of the people, for the people, by the people...   Instead we seem to have “the rule of the ballot-box or psephocracy”, in the words of the New Statesman 1966. What we most seem to need now is the psephograph, a word coined back in 1906 for a machine designed to automatically record votes and prevent fraud at the ballot box.

Pam Peters

Ranga

Since Julia Gillard’s ascendancy to the Prime Ministership, there has been some curious media coverage. Headlines like: “”On the cusp of a Julia ranga-lution” (The West Australian, 13.7.10), make her status as Australia’s first female leader pale into insignificance compared to the fact that she has red hair. The popularity of baiting redheaded people is attested by the number of slang terms to describe them: Ginger, blood nut, carrot top, coppernob, bluey etc. Ranga seems to be quite new to Australia – it appeared in the Macquarie Dictionary for the first time in its latest edition (2009). In Scotland redheads have been called wrangers for some time (possibly related to the Scottish spelling wrang for wrong, although this seems strange given the large proportion of redheaded Scots). The spelling ranga associates the word closely with the red-haired ape, the orangutan, which suggests its use can be quite offensive (although the Macquarie only labels it “mildly derogatory”). Certainly in the TV series that popularised the word in Australia, Summer Heights High (2007), ranga was meant to offend: “A Ranga sir. Cause he’s got red hair. Orangutang, that’s what we call him”. Gillard’s new role may turn out to be as important for rectifying hair bias as it is for evening up gender inequality.

Adam Smith

Click here to read the Word Column in the previous edition of Australian Style (16.1).

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