Disenfranchised baseball fans

Buzz Bissinger’s excellent op-ed in today’s New York Times about sympathy for Barry Bonds due to the government being an absolute dick to him and his family, despite Bonds’s almost total repulsiveness, displays an interesting word usage error (the emphasis is, of course, mine):

Under such conditions up until 2006, what player in his right mind would not have taken performance enhancers? It potentially meant millions of dollars for each. Money talks and the rest of it walks. That is the American way whether we like it or not. In the case of Bonds, it also meant tens, if not hundreds, of millions for a league that had become desperate for home runs as a way of continuing to reclaim fans that had become disenfranchised during the hideous strike of 1994 and the cancellation of that year’s World Series.

As a famous Spaniard once said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Clearly what Bissinger means is disenchanted, not disenfranchised: the former means “disappointed” while the latter means “deprived of the right to vote”. The baseball fans in question were not deprived of anything by the 1994 strike, save perhaps the opportunity to watch artificially muscly men swing a piece of wood at a leather-covered ball. The only voting right that might have been lost was the right to vote for the All-Stars. Obviously Bissinger meant something else.

How did Bissinger get from disenchanted to disenfranchised? Most obviously the words sound alike. They share identical first two syllables, -ed part participle endings, inner [æ] vowels, and stress on the penult (second-to-last syllable). I think the answer, though, may lie a little towards the subconscious. The two words don’t really share any semantic overlap, but we have been hearing a lot about “disenfranchised [black] voters” and “disenchanted [Hillary] voters” (substitute your own phrases according to political preference) during this election season in the United States, so I don’t find it impossible that some semantic wires might have become crossed here. A simple substitution error, perhaps, but interesting to speculate about nonetheless.