The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

What News on the Rialto?

For all its drainage problems, Venice has given the English language a fair number of words besides terra firma. Several parts of the city have entered the language. It was Venice that had the original Ghetto and the original Arsenale, where the warships were made. The first regattas were held on Venice’s Grand Canal; and the lagoon in which Venice stands was the original lagoon (and is cognate with English lake and Scots loch and even the bibliographic lacuna).

Venice was the first modern democracy, which is why ballot comes from the Venetian word ballotte, which means small balls. Indeed, the word ballot arrived on English shores inside The Historie of Italie by William Thomas, because the Venetians would cast their votes by placing different coloured ballotte in a bag.

The same naming process happened with the voting in ancient Athens. When the Athenians wanted to banish somebody for not being classical enough, they would vote on the question by putting little black or white fragments of pottery in a box. White meant he could stay: black meant banishment. These tiles were called ostrakons. Hence ostracism. Ostracism has nothing to do with ostriches but is distantly related to oysters (both words relate to bone).

The method and term survives to this day in blackballing. In the gentlemen’s clubs of London, an application for membership may be refused on the basis of a single black ball in the ball-ot box.

In ancient Syracuse, votes for banishment didn’t use shards of pottery. They used olive leaves and so ostracism was called petalismos, which is far more beautiful.

Venice was also the first place to introduce what we would now call newspapers. These appeared in the mid-sixteenth century and were little sheets describing trade, war, prices and all the other things that a Venetian merchant would need to know about. They were very cheap and were known as a halfpennyworth of news or, in the Venetian dialect, a gazeta de la novita. Gazeta was the name for a Venetian coin of very little value, so called because on it was a picture of a magpie or gazeta. Gazette was therefore a doubly appropriate name: it referred both to the cheapness of the news and to the fact that newspapers were, from the first, as unreliable as the chattering of a magpie, and filled with useless trinkets like the thieving magpie’s nest. The Elizabethan linguist John Florio said that gazettes were ‘running reports, daily newes, idle intelligences, or flim flam tales that are daily written from Italie, namely from Rome and Venice’.

How different from our own more modern magazines. Now, can you take a guess as to why a magazine is a glossy thing filled with news and a metal thing filled with bullets?