Since we’re in the midst of many heated election campaigns, I thought you might like to read a portion of William Safire’s definition of “campaign” in Safire’s Political Dictionary:
Campaign comes from the French word for open, level country and evolved from there into the military vocabulary, where it was first used to denote the amount of time an army was kept in the field; later it denoted a particular military operation. In seventeenth-century England, the term was extended to politics and usually meant “a session of a legislative body.” The meaning further evolved in transatlantic passage as the business of getting elected to public office grew more complex. But the idea that politics is a form of combat remains.
John Hood will continue to follow the political combat in North Carolina in his Daily Journal.
