Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

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For all the failings of our western systems of government, we are living pretty high on the hog; which isn’t the case for places where they’ve had bad governments.

The word politics comes down to us from those originators of democracy, the ancient Greeks.

It was Aristotle who said “man is a political animal” and by this he didn’t mean that we are all scheming animals trying to be popular even at the cost or our ideals. Rather he meant that fish live in the sea and birds inhabit the air while men live best in a polis; the Greek word meaning “city.”

Clearly this is where we get metropolitan and cosmopolitan.

For the Greeks the city was also the state and so the governing of the polis became politics.

Ambrose Bierce was a bit of a cynic so according to his Devil’s Dictionary politics is “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

The root word polis has been around long enough, and how we govern ourselves is important enough, that plenty of words have evolved out of polis.

The politicians who get elected make policy decisions and if we the people don’t like doing what our political masters decree, then they call out the police.  The word police in fact used to be interchangeable with the word policy.

Once I got going on this jag I started wondering if the word polite might come from the polis root in a similar way that civilized comes from the same roots as civic and city.

Evidently not according to the usual etymological suspects. They instead point to a Latin word for “polished” as the ancestor to polite and make no connection to the Greek polis.

Another word everyone knows is the name of the place where all those old temples still stand in Athens Greece: The Acropolis.

It turns out every major town in Greece had its own acropolis since the word acropolis essentially means “uptown” and refers to that part of the city that sits up on the hill.

One of the most impressive structures on the Acropolis is the Parthenon and looking its worn columns with the broken stones lying around it it’s easy to believe they have stood for two and a half millennia.

But a surprising point is that the building was pretty much intact until about 300 years ago when a gunpowder storage facility housed there blew up.

Then 200 years ago the seventh Earl of Elgin shipped most of the nicer sculptures back to England.

I’d just like to say that over this holiday period I’m only going to post three episodes this week and next. Things will be back to normal in the New Year.