Susie Dent shares the fascinating origin of “going to the polls” just as Count Binface looks to get more votes than Laurence Fox in spite of the latter having a ludicrous £5 million campaign pot
With voting underway across the country, “that woman in Dictionary Corner” Susie Dent this morning shared with her 753,000 followers on Twitter the origin of “going to the polls” this morning:
Origin of the day: the ‘poll’ in ‘going to the polls’ originally meant ‘head’, referring to the counting of heads or votes. A ‘noddypoll’ was an incompetent fool, a ‘clod-poll’ a blockhead, and a ‘tadpoll’ (later ‘tadpole’) a ‘toad-head’.
Referencing what a lacklustre bag of bilge Londoners have been offered by the mainstream parties and echoing Nikolay Kalinin’s analysis of Labour’s national multifaceted mess for The Steeple Times yesterday, Inside Croydon declared of the campaign:
“It has been a very long, and very tedious, London election campaign, but for some of the capital’s voters, perhaps bewildered by the multitude of different voting systems employed and vast number of candidates for Mayor or the London Assembly, there has been one bright spot: Count Binface.”
“In elections that were postponed from 2020, among the various races-within-the-race for City Hall, there is a fascination among those who long ago tired of the lies of Tory Shaun Bailey or the deadly dull platitudes of Sadiq Khan (did you know: his father was a London bus driver?), the idea that a geezer with a bin on his head could attract more votes than the spittle-flecked campaign of Laurence Fox has lightened the mood these past couple of weeks.”
“And what’s more, unlike so much of so many of the pointless political campaigns, Binface is actually doing some good, by raising thousands of pounds for homelessness charities.”
Elsewhere on social media yesterday, Count Binface himself shared an amusing video based on Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody asking his followers to make him their first choice today. The Steeple Times’ editor Matthew Steeples duly obliged when he headed to St Columba’s Church of Scotland in Pont Street, SW1 this morning and casted a protest for Max Fosh as his second choice also.
