Courtney McGrailBy the Books Editor
Shifting truths in words and their meanngs
Film posters are currently all over the place for Suffragette, starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Nicole Kidman. What annoys me here is the use of the term “suffragette”. The women were not suffragettes (dating only from 1906). They called themselves suffragists (dating from 1885), campaigning as they did for the extension of the all-male suffrage to vote to women.
The term suffragette was one coined by their political enemies, along the lines, of course, of usherette or majorette. It was term of irritated contempt. (Suffrage, by the bye, means voting only by extension: originally it was applied to the prayers in Church for the souls of the departed.)
The government in the film is presented as taking strong measures against the women’s suffrage movement. But they were involved in far more than mere protest and window breaking and hunger strikes. There were also acts of sabotage and arson. These get little notice these days.
Nor does the planting of a bomb in the small chapel of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey which was thronged with tourists. People were only injured, none were killed. But today, in the support of any campaign such an act would be seen as terrorism.
These days the women’s suffrage movement is sentimentalised, especially for dramatic purposes. But to use the term suffragette is to disrespect the facts of history. People and events should be called by their right names. Otherwise history becomes for all what it so often is for our leaders, merely a means of manipulating the present in the quest of power.
The same applies to the events of Easter week in Dublin in 1916. That coup d’état complete with pronunciamiento quickly came to be called by its enemies in the government and the press as “the Sinn Féin revolt”, despite the fact that it had nothing to do with Sinn Féin, but was entirely the work of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
(There was nothing particularly ‘democratic’ about the IRB, who for two generations afterwards regarded the Army Council of the IRA as the legitimate government of Ireland – no matter what the people said. The right of the military to rule was an attitude that infected the Free State Army too, as we can see from the declarations during the Civil War which General Mulcahy issued from Portobello Barracks.)
Calling things by their proper names or proper natures is an essential part of revealing the truth. To disguise facts with milder terms is to actually avoid arriving at the truth. But the avoidance of truth often goes to the heart of human affairs, both public and private. Meaning becomes a very fluid thing in some cases.
Take for instance the Catechism of the Council of Trent in English, which explains that: “It is lawful to have images in the church, and to give honour and worship unto them…” Many Protestants have interpreted this in the same sense of what they call the idol worship of the ancient pagan.
Meaning
What was at issue here was a sense of the meaning of the word “worship” from the Old and Middle English, and “venerate” from the Latin. Venerate is from venerari. In Latin, worship is cultus, which introduces a new idea. For the Latin speaker worship was perhaps more properly adoratio, hence our word adoration.
What the Council of Trent wanted to express in Latin, but which got lost in the English translation, was the difference between honouring an image or a person, and adoration, which is due only to God.
All of this goes to show that when using any word we should be alert not just to its current meaning, as it might seem to us, but to its origins and its former uses.
In this respect, suffragette is not the worse example. Even more irritating is the failure to understand the distinction between uninterested and disinterested, in the sense of “not influenced by considerations of personal advantage”.
This sense of altruism, which we hear little about these days either, is a concept vital to civil and personal life. To lose a sense of its meaning would be a loss to humanity.