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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Suffrage
Why would a 17th-century writer
warn people that a chapel was only for "private or secret suffrages"?
Because suffrage has been used since the 14th century to mean
"prayer" (especially a prayer requesting divine help or
intercession). So how did suffrage come to mean "a vote" or "the
right to vote"? To answer that, we must look to the word's Medieval Latin
ancestor, suffrāgium, which can be translated as meaning "vote,"
"support," or "prayer." That term produced descendants in a
number of languages, and English picked up its senses of suffrage from two
different places. We took the "prayer" sense from a Middle French
suffrāgium offspring that emphasized the word's spiritual aspects, and we
elected to adopt the "voting" senses directly from the original
Latin.
Targeted killings of journalists surged in 2020, group says
Its tally of journalists and
media workers killed in connection with their work by mid-December was just
slightly lower than in 2019, when the press freedom group counted 53 dead, even
though many journalists reported less from the field in 2020 because of the
coronavirus pandemic.
The group said 68% were killed
outside of war zones this year. That confirms a trend noted by the group since
2016, when only four out of 10 deaths were in countries not at war.
Targeted killings of journalists
surged in 2020, accounting for 84% of deaths, sharply up from 63% in 2019, the
group said.
It again listed Mexico as the
deadliest country for media workers, counting at least eight journalists killed
there in connection with their work in 2020. Among them was Julio Valdivia, a
newspaper reporter whose decapitated body was found in September in an area
ridden with organized crime.
Among six media deaths that the
group counted in Iraq was the killing in July of Hisham al-Hashimi, a leading
expert on the Islamic State and other armed groups, who was shot dead outside
his Baghdad home.
Reporters Without Borders also
noted an increase in the killings of investigative journalists, including four
who were looking into organized crime groups, 10 who were reporting on
corruption and the misuse of public funds and three who were working on
environmental issues including illegal mining and land grabs.
Reporting on civil unrest also
proved particularly deadly, the group said, with seven journalists killed while
covering protests — four of them in Iraq, two in Nigeria and one in Colombia.
Reporters Without Borders report:
https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/rsf_round-up_killed.pdf
Franchise
Franchise was voted into early 14th-century English as both a noun and verb. It is from the Anglo-French verb franchir, meaning "to free," itself from franc, "free." To be perfectly frank, the word franchise is most often encountered today with reference to restaurant chains or professional sports teams (e.g., "a franchise quarterback"), not to mention branded retail stores and sequel-driven movies and novels. These commercial meanings are far from the original meaning of the word in English: "freedom or immunity from some burden or restriction vested in a person or group." This meaning evolved into the "right to vote" sense of the word.
