ONE or two curious spirits asked me during the recent election campaign where the word candidate came from. It is from the Latin candidus, white. Those intending to claim the suffrages of the people in ancient Rome were obliged to dress up in white togas, being therefore called candidati.
Candidates are known to have ambition but perhaps not all of them knew that this word is also from the Latin, through Old French. The Latin ambitio meant a going round of candidates striving to please, of course, from ambire to go round. Milton had the old meaning of the word in mind when he wrote: "To reign is worth ambition, though in hell."
One of my local candidates claimed in his election literature to have worked assiduously for the good of all. A local man to whom I spoke about our friend's chances said he would not vote for him because sitting on his bundun was all he had done for years back, in his humble opinion. Interestingly, assiduously comes from another Latin word assiduus, sitting down to (something), on one's bundun, where else, from assidere, to sit beside, from sedere, to sit.
Whatever about being assiduous, our candidate must have been attentive to the needs of his electors once again he was successful. Attentive comes from Latin attendere, from ad, a prefix meaning to express motion to direction towards, and tendere, to stretch. I can, see the old, Roman politician, sitting in his white toga, his tabula in his hand, the butt of a stilus at the ready, stretching out his neck to listen to the complaint of a potential suffragator, ebrius as a skunk, who just might give him his votum if he bought him another few scoops of vinum. Thought your Latin was rusty, did you?
A man who knows the sea, having fished from all the great ports from Killybegs to Vigo in his time asks me where the word dorm, a catnap, comes from; he has heard it used by seafarers from Yarmouth, the Faroes, Shetland and Orkney.
Well, it didn't come directly from the Latin dormire, to sleep, I feel sure, but from a language that has left a more lasting impression on the speech of seamen from the northern world. The Old Norse, borrowing from Latin, has dorma, a snooze; and the word can still be heard in modern Iceland as well as in Killybegs among the old-timers, according to one of them, my friend, Tom Carr.