Dear grapho: Fear not the psephoi, but beware the ostrakoi.
ostracize
ostracise
verb ostracized, ostracizing

1. To exclude someone from a group or society, etc; to refuse to associate with them.

Thesaurus: banish, bar, blacklist, blackball, cast out, shun, snub, expel; Antonym: receive, welcome, reinstate.
2. historical
In Athens and other ancient Greek cities: to banish someone by popular vote. The banishment was for a fixed period of up to ten years and did not involve loss of property or citizenship.
Derivative: ostracism
noun

Etymology: 17c: from Greek ostrakizein, from ostrakon potsherd, because in ancient Greece the voters wrote on potsherds the name of the person they wished to banish.

To save tsuwm the trouble of telling you, I remember getting
"psephology" from him over two years ago.

And all this while I was under the impression that politicians deserve stones ( pebbles ), as thus the word.
I am from India, and its true here. ;->

from India, and its true here

And we thought that things were so different over there.

Welcome to the Board, chirag.

The story goes that when the Athenian politician Aristides had been proposed for ostracism an illiterate voter approached Aristides for help, not knowing who he was. Aristides was somewhat surprised at being asked to write his own name on the sherd, and asked why the voter wanted to ostracise Aristides. Had Aristides ever done him any harm? "Oh no," the voter replied, "I'm just sick of everybody saying how fair and just he is." Aristides then dutifully wrote his own name on the ostrakon.

Bingley

Interesting word, psephos 'darkness', but psêphos == calculus (< calx, calcis 'stone' + dim. suf.) or lapillus (< 'little stone' lapis + dim. suf.). Another voting related word is L prærogativa 'the tribe or century to which it fell, by lot, to vote first in the Comitia'.

century

as in group of 100?

Yes, centuria < centum '100'. Originally, just a 100 of anything, but soon, soldiers (in a legion), acres, and a finally 'one of the one hundred and ninety-three orders into which Servius Tullius divided the Roman people according to their property'.

A legio consisted of (usually) 10 cohorts of men (plus 300 cavalry). A cohort (lit. 'fenced-in') consisted of 3 maniples (lit. 'handful') or 6 centuries. Centurions were in charge of centuries, while legates were in charge of a legion. Those whacky Romans.

anybody in charge of a cohort?

and did I do my math right? a legion would be 18,000 men, plus 300 calvary?

interesting which words have thrived and which have not...

I probably got my numbers mixed up. Legions were between 4K and 6K strong. Century = 100, maniples = 600, legion = 6000. Host is another military that seems to have thrived. Horde, too.

nah, my mis-reading. I read it as a maniple equalling six centuries and a cohort was three maniples, hence 1800.

thanks for the clari...

A modern use of "cohort" in statistics that I encountered in
papers about epidemiology of poliomyelitis back in fifties
was "the group of children born in same year".

I just love these, Bingley!

A modern use of "cohort" ...(is) "the group of children born in same year".


that's the only meaning i knew for the word.. (having been born in one of the largest cohorts! --in US)

huh. I've always used cohort as just to mean companion, "you and your cohorts". perhaps a friendly negative, but nothing specific about birth dates...