Afforce (pronounced af-fors)
(1) To strengthen or
reinforce by the addition of other or of specially skilled members, deliberative
bodies such as juries or tribunals.
(2) To force; compel;
violate (obsolete).
(3) Reflexively, to
exert one's self; endeavour; attempt (obsolete).
1400s: From the Middle
English (in the sense “to force”), from the Old French aforcer, from the Latin exfortiāre,
from fortis (strong), from the
Proto-Italic forktis, from the
primitive Indo-European baergh (to
rise, high, hill). The a- prefix as used
here is rare and is in English no longer productive. It was related to the Latin ad- (to; at) and was used to show or
emphasize a state, condition, or manner and was common in Old & Middle English,
some of the constructs still used poetically (apace, afire, aboil, a-bling) and
some where the specific, technical meaning has endured (asunder, astern). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) noted the
descent of many of these form to the archaic, suggesting it was part of the
organic evolution of the language, these “…prefixes were at length confusedly
lumped together in idea, and the resultant a- looked upon as vaguely intensive,
rhetorical, euphonic or even archaic and wholly otiose.” The double-ff is a written tribute to the
spoken, afforce formed with an oral prefix; the noun counterpart of this was æf-. Afforce, afforcing & afforced are verbs, afforcement is a noun; the noun plural is afforcements.
Afforce thus emerged just
as a way of emphasizing the notion of force or indicating the act transpiring. Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1343-1400) in The Man of Law's Tale (1387), the fifth of
the Canterbury Tales uses afforce in that sense: “Than whan
thys wycked Thelous by harde manasses and hys grete strengh the had wyll to
afforce her, than she restreynyd hys gret foly by thys reason, ffor cause that
her Chylde Moryce the whyche was of the age of.”
That strict arbiter of
English use, Sir Ernest Gowers (1880-1966), noted approvingly in his second
edition (1965) of Henry Fowler's (1858–1933) Modern English Usage (1926) that the OED as early as 1888 ruled afforce
was for all purposes obsolete save "to reinforce or strengthen a
deliberative body by the addition of new members, as a jury by skilled
assessors or persons acquainted with the facts". Sir Ernest seemed also pleased the OED had
sought to drive a stake through afforce's linguistic heart by not including an
entry in the concise (COD) edition of the OED, adding that he regarded any
revival as but a flashy "pride of knowledge", a most "un-amiable
characteristic", the display of which "sedulously should be avoided". Sir Ernest had spoken, Henry Fowler would have concurred and in any sense afforce
remains vanishingly rare.
It was the operation
of jury trials in English law which saw the meaning beginning to shift although
the legal use did encapsulate both senses.
At common law, the practice to “afforce the assize” was a method for a
court to secure a verdict where the jury disagreed. This was achieved by adding other jurors to
the panel until twelve could be found who were unanimous in their opinion, thus
the senses (1) afforcement being forcing a jury to verdict and (2) afforcement
being the addition of members to the jury.
The word has endured (if rarely used) in this technical sense and not become
merely a synonym of augment, somewhat unusual in English where words tend to be
co-opted for just about use which seems to fit and it may be that when courts
ceased to afforce, juries, the word became stranded in its special, historic
sense, a process probably assisted by the practice of adding the a- prefix
faded.
Vested with both civil
and criminal jurisdiction, the Courts of Assize sat between 1293-1972 in the counties
of England and Wales. The afforcement of
the assize was an ancient practice in trials by jury and involved adding other
jurors to the panel in cases where the jurors differed among themselves and couldn’t
agree in one (sententiam) finding. In
those instances, at the discretion of the judges, either the jury could be
afforced or the existing body could be compelled to unanimity by directing the
sheriff to lock them up without food or drink until they did agree. The latter does sound an extreme measure;
even when medieval conclaves of cardinals proved unable to organise the numbers
to elect a new pope, when their eminences were locked-up, they were at least
given bread and water.
However it was done,
afforcement or starvation, the objective was to get to the point where there
were twelve who could agree on a verdict.
However, as legal theorists at the time observed, this really created a second
trial and eventually afforcement was abandoned, both justice and its
administration thought better served by an insistence on unanimity (probably an
inheritance from canon law and a common thing on the continent where the
unanimity of a consultative or deliberative body was deemed indispensable). Also refined was the practice of confining
jurors without meat and drink; now they’re fed and watered and, if after long
enough some prove still recalcitrant, the jury is discharged and a new trial
may be ordered. Some jurisdictions have
found this too inefficient and have introduced majority verdicts so only ten or
eleven of the twelve need to be convinced a defendant is guilty as sin which, as any prosecutor will tell you, they all are.
There have too been attempts
to afforce the bench. Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1882–1945; US President 1933-1945), not best pleased at repeatedly having
parts of his New Deal legislation declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme
Court, in 1937 created the Judicial
Procedures Reform Bill which sought to add sympathetic judges to the bench,
his argument being the constitution not mandating than there must be nine
judges on the bench, it was a matter for congress to determine the number. He was apparently serious but may also have
had in mind the threat in 1911 by the UK’s Liberal Party government to appoint
to the House of Lords as many peers as would be necessary to ensure the upper
house could no longer block their legislation.
That worked, the peers backing down and allowing the government’s
reforms to pass into law, the feeling always that they were less appalled by creeping
socialism than the thought of the House of Lords being flooded with “jumped-up
grocers”. It may also have worked in the
US, the "court-packing plan" ultimately not required. Some months after FDR’s landslide victory in
the 1936 presidential election, Justice Owen Roberts (1875–1955; US Supreme
Court judge 1930-1945) switched his vote, creating a pro-New Deal majority, an
act remembered in judicial history as the "the switch in time that saved
nine".
The idea of “packing the court” has been revived before but in 2021, congressional Democrats introduced a bill for an act which would expand the Supreme Court bench from nine to thirteen, essentially for the same reasons which attracted FDR in 1937. Unlike then however, the Democrat control of both houses was marginal and there was no chance of success and even had there been an unexpectedly good result in the 2022 mid-term elections, nothing would have overcome the resistance of conservative Democrats in the senate. With the Republican-appointed judges (reactionary medievalists or black-letter law judges depending on one’s view) likely to be in place for decades, the 2021 bill is more a shot across the judicial bow and the interplay between electoral outcomes and public opinion, of which the judges are well aware, will bubble and perhaps boil in the years ahead.
Lindsay Lohan on the panel of The Masked Singer (2019).
The Masked Singer Australia is a TV singing competition, the local franchise of a format which began in South Korea as the King of Mask Singer. The premise is that elaborately costumed masked celebrities sing a song and a panel has to guess their identity. In 2019, the producers afforced the judging panel with the appointment of Lindsay Lohan and the experiment seems to have been a success despite Ms Lohan having little or no idea who the local celebrities were, masked or otherwise. That may have been part of the charm of her performance and it seemed to gel with viewers, the second series in 2020, in which Ms Lohan wasn’t able to participate because of COVID-19 quarantine restrictions, seeing a sharp decline in viewer numbers, the opening episode down 37% from 1.2 million to 733k. Overall, the season average in the five mainland capital cities dropped to 816k from 928k, a year-on-year drop of 12%. In October 2021, Warner Brothers TV announced a third series had been commissioned for broadcast in 2022 but Lindsay Lohan didn't again afforce the panel, depriving audiences of the chance to watch her try to guess the names of people she's never heard of. #BringBackLindsay is expected to trend.
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