The Political Phrases That Say Nothing About Politics

Party conference season fills the airwaves with slogans, and three of the phrases reached for most often this week have far odder histories than the arguments they now get dragged into. As delegates in the conference halls trade accusations, walk out of debates and declare each other fair game, it is worth tracing where that language actually came from.

A term coined by its harshest critics

“Politically correct” is one of the most-used three-word insults in British politics, but it began life describing something far darker than a debate about phrasing. In 1934 the New York Times reported that Nazi Germany restricted press credentials to journalists whose views aligned with the regime, granting them “only to pure ‘Aryans’ whose opinions are politically correct.” The phrase itself is older still: documented use goes back to a January 1930 issue of The Communist, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA. It took decades to become the phrase conference-goers argue about today. The modern sense, tied to inclusive language and often used as a jibe, entered mainstream usage via American feminist and other left-wing movements of the 1970s, as set out at politically correct. A phrase now aimed almost entirely from the right began, in other words, as a term of approval on the left.

Hunting terms turned on politicians

Once conference week starts, commentators declare “open season” on a struggling leader within days. The phrase carried no political charge at all when it started: it referred simply to the lifting of hunting restrictions, documented from the early 19th century, with an 1820 newspaper noting that “salmon may be got during the open season.” The figurative sense, meaning a period when someone or something becomes a target, took nearly a century to appear. It shows up considerably later, in a 1910 New York newspaper writing about baseball, observing that “this surely is the open season for pitchers in the National League.” Only after that did the phrase migrate into politics, where a minister can now find themselves fair game the moment their name is raised from a conference platform, according to open season.

Walking out, literally

Conference floors occasionally produce a real walkout, and reporters reach for “vote with their feet” to describe it. The political use of the phrase is traced to Vladimir Lenin’s description of Russian soldiers who deserted the Tsar’s army during the 1917 Revolution: “They voted with their feet.” But the idea behind the phrase predates Communist Russia by close to two thousand years. It originates in the practice of Roman senators, who registered support for a motion not by speaking but by physically moving to stand beside the senator whose position they favoured, a practice recorded in Latin as pedibus in sententiam ire, according to vote with their feet.

Three phrases, three unrelated origins, and one common thread: none of them meant, at the start, what a conference hall means by them now. Sirens, salmon and Roman senators got there first, long before anyone thought to apply the words to a party leader’s conference speech.