Jaki Jean on the Word of the Day this Election Day

Every day I received an email from Dictionary.com with their Word of the Day.  

Once, in a prior incarnation of myself, I sat around a table in a meeting with my supervisor & the head of a company in his office, in a shipyard in Galveston, Texas.

Our host asked each of us how we were & I replied, “Scintillating, thank you.”

He sat back & smiled & asked:

Was that the Word of the Day?

I laughed & assured him that it was not the Word of the Day, that I truly felt scintillating.

He did not believe me, went to his computer & checked Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day.  Then he looked up the definition of scintillating.

He left his desk & rejoined us & looked to my supervisor, & asked, is she always like this?   My supervisor smiled & said:  

This is just one of the reasons I have her on my team.

Today’s Word of the Day is suffrage.

Origin of suffrage

Suffrage comes from the Latin noun suffrāgium meaning "voting tablet, vote," which is a derivative of the verb suffrāgārī, "to vote for, support." When it entered English in the late 1300s, it originally meant "intercession or prayers (for someone)." By the time of St. Thomas More in the early 1500s, the word had acquired the sense of "a vote in favor of a motion," gradually coming to mean "collective vote, voting power." Its current sense "the right to vote" first appears in the U.S. Constitution (1789).

Today, I hope that everyone who is a registered voter will exercise the right to vote under the U.S. Constitution & that every eligible voter not yet registered will register in the near future.

I want every citizen to experience what my friend Andres M. Dominguez experienced this morning when he voted:

For me there is just a powerful feeling to stand in line with others who have a vested interest in our country, even though we may disagree.

America, this continuing experiment in democracy, depends upon the participation of its citizens. 

It will be a long night in the house that my parents Jean & Jack built.  Jean will stay awake until the final concession & acceptance speeches.  And I with her, just as I have done in the past during our journey together. 

So, I close with this, totally appropriated from Harry Belafonte’s thoughtful op-ed in The New York Times:

“O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath —

America will be!”

— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

America will be.