Walking in Naples we see the posters calling to mass. Wedding masses, but also masses for the death. It might very well be that the catholic congregation of Utrecht produce the same posters, but I haven’t seen them, so I stare at the Neapolitan ones as tourists stare at the many small things that tell us that this is not our place, that faith is the same word across borders, but it might very well be a different thing. It was at the second or third day that I realized that all these masses for the death, those offering in favor of the the afterlife of our loved ones, are called “messa di suffragio”, as in suffrage mass. But a mass… a mass is not a voting! And then it dawns on me again: voting? a votive offering is something that we offer… in order to “gain favor with supernatural forces” as the dictionary puts it.
Is this what voting is? Is voting an act of faith then?
Asking around to my friends, I hear that of course, vote comes from voice. To vote is to express your voice. That makes sense. It doesn’t shed light in the connection with offering, but it makes sense. Afterwards, though, I find that “vote” does not come from “voice” at all. The origin of the word vote is vow. So a vote is not so much an offering… but a promise? A commitment?
And then, what happened with suffrage? Well, it turns out that even in english suffrage is not only “the right to vote in public”, but in older english, suffrage was used to signify “intercessory prayers”, a particular kind of prayer in which the one who prays, prays not for himself or herself, but for somebody else.
So let’s start by the beginning. We have got the idea of suffrage, which is to ask higher powers for favors, for others (please mighty, cure my sister). But since the eighteen century the word has been appropriated for signifying political franchise, the right that we have to elect higher powers (I want my sister to be mighty). An interesting process of… empowerment? seems to be at play here. We started asking favors to the powerful… and we ended making the powerful? And then we have voting, which seems to have started as a negotiation with the powerful (if you, oh mighty, cure my sister I will lit a candle) to, again, decide who the powerful is (I vote for my sister to be the mighty).
And then again, this same changing content of the same word across fairly different languages is not so weird. Because what the changing meaning of these words does reflect is the changing role that we have created for ourselves. Until not so long ago, and for a very long time before, all what we could do was ask the powerful, perhaps even try to bribe the powerful. We had no agency whatsoever. And somehow, in few hundred years, we ourselves are the ones that give that power, the ones that decide who decide. All agency is ours, actually.
You really have to love how language is live history.