SUFFRAGE, n. I originally looked this word up because I wanted to know if it shared a root with “suffering.” It doesn’t. Suffrage and suffering are not connected—at least, not etymologically.
Suffrage, with its contemporary meaning of the political right to vote, shows up in the US Constitution in 1787. Interestingly, it’s about states, rather than citizens. It’s in Article V in the clause “…that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
Suffrage did mean voting before 1787. It originally comes from Latin suffragium, which meant a voting tablet, or more broadly, assent to or support for something. Where “suffragium” comes from is disputed. Possibly it’s “sub” (under) + “fragor” (a breaking, crash, an uproar), which I like. No uproar, no votes.
As direct and sensible as it would seem, we didn’t get English “suffrage” straight from the Latin word with almost the same meaning. “Suffragium” underwent a semantic shift in Medieval Latin and came to mean “prayer or plea on behalf of another person,” and then eventually it came into Old French as “sofrage” and from there we get English “suffrage” as in prayers. There is something poetic in this semantic wandering from a tangible voting tablet (and possibly its attendant uproar) to the intangible quiet of prayer or pleading.
Suffrage, in its modern meaning of the right to participate in political elections, feels like all of these things. You fill out the ballot. You pray. You plead.
Sometimes it doesn’t work.
The other way that votes are like prayers is that they’re worthless without faith. We all have to believe that an election is free and fair in order to accept the results as legitimate. It’s hard to have that kind of faith in any American institution when we live in a country that systematically oppresses and kills its Black citizens.
And voting has never been enough all by itself. There are things that voting cannot fix, and there are injustices that cannot wait for an election. The police murdering Black people is one of them. Protest is both righteous and required. It’s a good moment to donate to a community bail fund, if you can. Here’s one for Louisville that I donated to because I’m a Kentuckian, even though I don’t live there anymore.
I haven’t read anything in French (ie Capital-R Romance) in weeks and weeks, which I feel bad about, as I am going to have to teach some people how to speak it in September (possibly via Zoom?!), so look forward to all the late-summer issues of Word Suitcase where I tell you about the French 101 textbooks I’m despairing over.
Anyway, now back to the good part: it turns out I did manage to read some small-r romance novels this week, in addition to all the news.
Hoarfrost + Maelstrom (gay m/bi m, both cis, historical, fantasy) by Jordan L. Hawk. God, I love the “monsters are good actually / humans are the real monsters” direction the Whyborne & Griffin series has taken. It’s so impressive to see it unfold over the course of seven books, and these two were some of my favorites of the series. It’s also been a comfort, In These Times, to be able to return to this series where the characters feel like old friends, and I feel lucky to have four books still remaining. Content warnings: murder, violence, gore, homophobia, grief over the death of a homophobic parent, PTSD, emotional abuse (in the past), claustrophobia, mentions of racism, sex.
Passing Strange (bi f/lesbian f, both cis, historical, fantasy, novella) by Ellen Klages. Genre-wise, this might technically be more fantasy than romance, but it’s wildly romantic, so I’m putting it here. This novella is about six queer women in 1940s San Francisco, about the art they make and the magic they do and their little community and how they help each other out, and it is gorgeous. I would have read 500 more pages of all these women hanging out together.
I’m also in the middle of Stormsong (f/f?, historical, fantasy) by CL Polk and while I could just save it for next week’s newsletter, I wanted to mention it because it’s so gorgeously political. The main character, Dame Grace Hensley, is a member of the political/magical/wealthy elite trying to simultaneously cover up and make amends for a crime that her family and government have committed, and she is deliciously flawed and fascinating. And where I am in the book right now, she’s in a complicated professional and personal relationship with a dogged photojournalist named Avia Jessup, who maybe likes her, or is maybe just trying to get close enough to get the truth. Or… both? It’s so good. And CL Polk writes the best descriptive prose.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read the sci-fi novella All Systems Red by Martha Wells, which is narrated by a robot that calls itself Murderbot, and is way, way cuter than you might expect from that description. Really great science fiction.
On the subject of queer 20th-century San Franciso, Malinda Lo wrote this great newsletter about the life of Dr. Margaret Chung, and it pairs perfectly with Passing Strange, above.
Also probably of interest to readers of this newsletter is this essay on gibberish that a friend sent me. I loved the section on constructed languages in fantasy. I didn’t go full conlang when I wrote my fantasy novels—I knew I could either finish the books or fully flesh out the languages involved, but the latter would keep me from the former—but I did write myself a small set of rules to follow when inventing words, and I put those rules into a piece of language-generating software call Vulgar, which is dear to my heart.
See you next Sunday!