As I understand it the Democrats look likely to win a majority in the House of Representatives but the Senate is in the balance. So let’s look at the word senate for our word of the day.
The word senate has its origins in ancient Rome, but its linguistic ancestry stretches back thousands of years, reflecting the association between age, wisdom and political authority.
The English word senate derives from the Latin senatus, meaning a council of elders. This, in turn, comes from senex, the Latin word for an old man. The underlying idea was that age brought experience, judgement and wisdom, making older men particularly suitable for governing their communities.
The Latin senex is generally traced to the Proto-Indo-European root sen-, meaning ‘old’. This ancient root has produced several familiar English words, including senior, senile and senescence, the biological process of growing old. Interestingly, senile originally meant simply ‘pertaining to old age’, without necessarily implying the mental deterioration with which it is commonly associated today.
According to Roman tradition, the Senate was established by Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, around 753 BC. Its original members were supposedly one hundred distinguished elders, known as patres, or fathers. Their descendants became associated with Rome’s patrician class, and the senators themselves were regarded as custodians of Roman tradition.
During the Roman Republic, established in 509 BC, the Senate became an enormously influential institution. Although technically an advisory body, it exercised considerable authority over finance, foreign policy, military affairs and the administration of the state. Its members were not elected directly by the population to serve as senators, but generally entered through holding public office.
The Senate survived the Republic’s collapse and continued under the emperors, although its independence progressively diminished.
The word entered English during the Middle English period, through Old French senat, itself borrowed from Latin senatus. By the fourteenth century, English writers were using senate to describe the governing council of ancient Rome and, subsequently, comparable political assemblies elsewhere.
When the United States Constitution was drafted in 1787, its authors deliberately adopted the Roman terminology. The American Senate was conceived as the more deliberative chamber of Congress, originally elected by state legislatures rather than directly by voters. Direct election was introduced by the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.
There is a pleasing linguistic irony here. Although the American Senate is sometimes regarded as a chamber of political elders, its members need only be thirty years old.
Thus, a word originally describing a gathering of old men has evolved into the name of one of the world’s most powerful legislative institutions, preserving an ancient belief that wisdom and experience should guide government.