Tallyman

Making counts match in a Banana Republic

Come Mister tally-man, tally me banana, (Daylight come and we want go home)

- Harry Belafonte, Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)

You might have heard this famous calypso song. You couldn’t have missed it if you went to high-school with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau - he admitted to singing this in blackface during a talent show. 

The tallyman that Belafonte refers to is the person who counts the bananas being picked. “Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch” refers to the counting of the bananas – it’s easier to count by size instead of tallying each individual fruit.

The concept of a tallyman (even tally-man, or tally man) seems widespread across cultures. The term has referred to vote-counters, census agents, and debt-collectors. Over the years, the most popular usage has come to represent door-to-door salesmen who sell on hire-purchase schemes.

Experian, the software company, sells a product called Tallyman, to manage debt-collection. India’s biggest tax-software is called Tally. DC comics has a Batman villain called the Tally Man, who enjoyed two incarnations, in the mid-90s, and then in the late 2010s.

"Everybody has to pay the tally man."

- The Tally Man’s mother, in Shadow of the Bat #19 

Tally, comes from the words for a stick, which would be notched to keep count of something. The words are variously tallie (Anglo-French), or tallia (Medieval Latin), or Latin talea (Latin for a stick). Even the Medieval Latin talliare for "to tax," comes from the same roots. 

The phrase Tally Ho has a different origin. It comes from hunting, and the French taïaut, a cry used to excite hounds when hunting deer. Another possible origin is a two-word war-cry: taille haut, meaning “swords up” in preparation to attack. It was used by RAF pilots to announce an impending attack to their teams during WW2, and is now used by the NASA to signify sightings of other objects in space. 

The phrase Banana Republic was inspired by the socio-economics and geo-politics of multinational American corporations who operated banana plantations in Honduras and Guatemala in the early 20th century. It was coined by O. Henry in a short-story, written while he was hiding out in Tegucigalpa, when he was wanted for embezzling a bank in the US. Younger folks probably only know it as a clothing brand (strange choice of name).