A well-hung parliament

India trembled with emotions when Nehru spoke of "a tryst with destiny". The expression, though poetic, wasn’t entirely original. Franklin Roosevelt had made his finest speech, A Rendezvous With Destiny, eleven years earlier during the Great Depression. Tryst is a shorter word for rendezvous.

Englishmen pronounce the longer word as rondeivoo. Americans drawl randavoo or randy woo, which trysting lovers do. In 1991, CNN asked Bush the Father about "a sexual tryst" he allegedly had with a female assistant in Geneva in 1984. Bush said the question, though outrageous, could be expected "in this kind of screwy climate".

An imaginary tryst between Bush the Son and the media queen Martha Stewart is the story of an anti-Iraq war play, George & Martha, by New York University professor Karen Finley. Both characters appeared unclothed on the stage, unlike their namesakes in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Finley, playing Martha, shaved George’s genitals in a pun on the word bush.

Tryst is a lovers’ meeting, an affair. Another word for affair is thing. Thing is also a euphemism for genitals. Shakespeare felt no shame when he put thing into young Romeo’s mouth. "Is love a tender thing? It is too rough/ Too rude, too boisterous and it pricks like thorn," protests the lover boy. His friend Mercutio, who started the thing thing in the previous line, puns back: "If love be rough with you, be rough with love/ Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down." Poetry beats the meat.

Like rendezvous, thing originally meant assembly. That meaning survives in Althing, the parliament of Iceland, which is the first country to go limp in the current recession. Storting, the parliament of Norway, another cold country, has also preserved thing. Thing stirs unseen in hustings, a combination of hus (house) and thing (assembly) from the virile Viking tongue that licked the Anglo-Saxon lingo into shape. Hustings later became election platform.

Election is to pick the eligible, but poll is related to Finley’s curly bush. Polle, in Dutch, meant hair of the head. Counting heads was a pioneering polling method. Going by roots, ballot should favour the Congress party: it evolved from Italian pallotte, small balls used to count votes in Venice.

Candidates also come from Italy—office seekers in Rome were called candidatus because they wore white robes known as dandidus. The word candid is a relative, though not of cunning politicians even if they wear virgin white. Nehru wore colourful jackets with a rosebud in his buttonhole. His election to Parliament from Phulpur (flower town) would have gladdened Roosevelt in his grave. The name Roosevelt means rose field.

Parliament is a gathering of owls, just as murder is a group of crows. Parliamentarians have got away with murder. Cromwell culled the king Charles I, and made and unmade parliaments. He sounded like Somnath Chatterjee, sententious and hoarse with disgust. "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say," he told the ‘Rump’ Parliament in 1653. Unlike Chatterjee, he called the members "cheats and whore-masters". God bless him: no one spoke a truer word.

Assembly, far from the braying kind, is a place where members can safely dissemble: they lie through their seat – and make a rumpus. Assemblies may go into suspended animation, which in science is near-death life. Suspended is another word for hung. A well-hung man is hardly dead: he is actually endowed with a large penis. Dryden drooled about "well-hung Balaam" in Absalom and Achitophel. Auden, who was gay, wrote: "As the poets have mournfully sung/ Death takes the innocent young/ The rolling-in-money/ The screamingly-funny/ And those who are very well-hung."

India has had several hung parliaments. The elections next month, for a change, may throw up a well-hung house. Cast your vote for the real thing.

*This article appeared in the Indian newsmagazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in March 2009.