galaxyrocker wrote:Because it's composed of dis- and enfranchise, not dis- and franchise. Franchise exists in my dialect, certainly, but only as it relates to fast-food franchises and such.Tomás wrote:"Disenfranchised" sounds wrong to me. Say "disfranchised". Why add the unnecessary syllable?
In my view, Tomás has submitted a word-pair that many grammarians would support. A similar example would be "disembark", whereas "debark" would be the more correct term. The English language abounds with such curiosities; for example, since my childhood, I have never been able to understand the (apparent) necessity of the particularly bizarre group: "flammable, inflammable, uninflammable." That is, since the prefix "in" normally has a negative or privative force, especially in adjectives and their derivatives (e.g., inattention; indefensible; inexpensive; inorganic; invariable), "inflammable" should have the (accepted) meaning of "uninflammable" (note the double negative here!), and the latter should not exist.