To be ostracised is to be exiled or excluded from a group, who all have a chat and decide you can’t hang around with them anymore, the utter bastards. Like a lot of our words it comes from a Greek word, ostraka, which refers to a shard of pottery. But what does that have to do with being exiled by a bunch of people, I hear you ask?
Well, imagine you’re a VIP in Athens in Ancient Greece. But you’re a bit of a renegade. A lone wolf, marching to the beat of your own drum. If all that rebelliousness meant you proved to be a bit too much of a thorn in the side of the powers that be, they’d get together and have a Big Brother-style vote to decide whether to get rid of you or not. But instead of going to ye olde diary room to cast their vote, they’d write your name down on, you’ve guessed it, a bit of pottery (also called a ‘potsherd’). And if you got enough pieces of pottery with your name on then you got exiled from Athens i.e. ostracised, for TEN WHOLE YEARS.
Why did they use broken pottery? Because there was a shit tonne of it hanging around, basically. Paper obviously wasn’t readily available and papyrus had to be imported from Egypt, making it much too expensive to be used for something like this.
These ostraka are from 482 BC, and were found in a well near the Acropolis. The name on them is ‘Themistocles’ who, after he was ostracised, defected to Persia where he was made governor of Magnesia (where ‘milk of’ comes from presumably?).