Language and Politics

Politics/Politician/Political/Politicize

Few words in English carry such negative connotations as the word politician. “Connotation” refers to the level of meaning based on associations we attach to words, whereas “denotation” is the referential meaning, the barest core of a word's meaning. A denotative definition of the word politician might be [Page 392]something like “a person who is practically engaged in running a country, district, or town,” but the connotations surrounding the word politician are nearly always negative, often strongly so.

The suggestion that politicians are somehow sinister, devious figures goes back a long way. Hotspur in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, says of his opponent Bolingbroke:

• I am whipt and scourg'd with rods
• Nettled, and stung with pismires (ants), when I hear
• Of this vile politician.

And King Lear says to the blinded Gloucester:

• Get thee glass eyes
• And like a scurvy politician, seem
• To see the things thou dost not.

Because the word politician carries such negative connotations, another word is required for those few politicians who achieve and sustain almost universal popularity. If the word politician carries such a stigma, then what can we call figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela, whose reputations are largely untainted with the usual connotations of deviousness? One word often used to describe them is statesman, a word that carries connotations of wisdom, vision, dignity.

The noun politician belongs to a family of words: politic, politics, political, politicize are some others. The root form politic comes originally from classical Greek, meaning “city, citizen, civic,” but even Greek philosophers like Plato described politics as “nothing but corruption.”

The idea that politics refers broadly to people and the lives they lead in organized communities rather than more narrowly to the battleground of conventional party politics became used again in the 1960s. Feminists, for instance, talked of sexual politics; in using this term they were arguing that culture and ways of behavior, including how we use language, have to be examined and changed. In this sense, then, to politicize an issue is a positive move—it is to subject it to rigorous and careful analysis and to act upon the subsequent findings. To describe an issue as “political,” in this usage of the word, is to demand a serious analysis and recognize the need for change; those who seek such analysis and change will often urge those close to the issue to become “politicized.” To talk of the politics of food production, for example, suggests that there is something wrong with the way food is currently produced, something wrong with the systems that support that production, and that changes must be made.

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