Who's Going to Win on Tuesday?

I was reading a story about early voting and how to interpret the numbers when I ran across the word salience. And there it was – my starting point for today’s pre-election blog.

So I went to the dictionary to find the definition of salience is…the state or condition of being salient. (A definition like that is like kissing your sister.) So one must go to the word salient for real understanding. Salient is defined as prominent or conspicuous. It second definition is “projecting or pointing outward”, and the third definition given is “leaping or jumping.” It sounds like a good word for something that “jumps out at you.” In my experience it is generally used in reference to arguments or debate points.

Salient came to English in the 1560s when it was used as a “Heraldic” term for “leaping”. It came from the Latin word salientem. Over a century later (in the 1680s) it developed a military sense of “pointing outward”. I would have thought it a geometric phrase, but I would have been wrong. It wasn’t until the 1840s that it developed the sense of something prominent or striking, although the phrase “salient point” can be traced to the 1670s. Aristotle used the phrase punctum saliens, literally “leaping point” or we might say “point of departure” or “jumping off point.”

The story about early voting also was related to semiotics, the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior. As a philosophy it is usually divided into pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics. But  I think it’s applicable because the media are full of semiotics, in many cases of dueling semiotics as campaign operatives strive to balance their polling, observations, and anecdotal information with what places their candidate(s) in the best position to pick up last minute voters or inspire the base to turn out. There was a link in the aforementioned story to early voting statistics by precinct so you could interpret for yourself whether your candidate has an early advantage or not. It’s that close an election.

Semiotics as a field of study was first used in the 1880s, but the adjective semiotic came to English in the 1620s and meant “of symptoms”. Its use in psychology only dates back to 1923. It came from the Greek word semeiotikos, which meant observant, particularly of signs or symptoms.

Another good word to use in anticipation of the election is latitudinarian. I encountered the word in the book Bunts, by George Will (a book on baseball that I highly recommend). Latitudinarian means “allowing or characterized by latitude in opinion or conduct, especially in religious views.” It is not something you see much during campaigns. When Chris Christie shows latitudinarian attitude toward Obama’s response to the storm Sandy, it was salient, standing out from most of what we’ve been hearing for months. Latitudinarian came to English in the 1660s from the Latin prefix latitudin-, or freedom from narrow restrictions. It was originally used in reference to Epicopalian clergymen who were characterized by their broad-mindedness in doctrinal matters. We get the word latitude from the same Latin root.

Who’s going to win on Tuesday? Using semiotics and watching the salient returns, your guess is as good as mine. Let’s just agree to be latitudinarian, not matter who wins.