A Question of Terminology by Cecilia Peartree
I suppose as a writer I think about terminology quite a lot, and in fact in my day job as a database manager and general data wrangler I do this even more, although mostly when trying to prevent other database users from creating lots of different terms for the same thing and thereby making it impossible to search the database with any hope of success. In the past few days, events have conspired to make me look more closely at the words 'suffragist' and 'suffragette', and the difference between them. I don't think I had given much thought to this before, having accepted the usual story that suffragettes were the militant ones whose desire for the vote caused them to set fire to things and annoy people, while suffragists wanted the vote but weren't prepared to die - or kill - for it. There was also the fact that men could be suffragists, but not suffragettes. When I consulted some online dictionaries, I found that the word 'suffragist' dated from the 1...