At the Wording Desk

Our Word Travel comes from Trepalium, a Roman Torture Device Our English word travel descends from travail in Old French whose first French meaning was le travail d’enfant ‘the pain of child-birth,’ so we’re not talking about some trifling inconvenient discomfort. The first meaning of travailler in Old French was to suffer real torture. The first English meaning of travail was painful corporeal toil or oppressive suffering. The word travel in its earliest English semantic outing also meant toil and trouble, even the travails and difficult labours of child-birth. In Medieval French travailler implied odious and literally painful forms of transporting oneself. From these uncomfortable meanings evolved the modern English meanings of travel, which don’t begin to appear in Britain until the onset of the fifteenth century. In French and Spanish, the derivatives came to signify hard work: le travail and el trabajo. From 1080 CE we have record of travailler’s ancestor, a vulgar Latin verb tripaliare ‘to be tortured with a tripalium or trepalium, a device with ‘three stakes’ as the Latin name implies: Latin tres, tris, tri ‘three’ + Latin palus ‘wooden or metal stake.’ It probably involved impalement of the human body in some gruesome torture beloved of the Romans. The instrument of torture arose from trepalium’s first Latin meaning, a farmyard and blacksmith’s contraption with three stakes used to immobilize horses and oxen while putting on or changing horseshoes. If you have ever seen a drama depicting gladiatorial practice, you may have seen a junior gladiator swinging his gladius or short sword at a wooden dummy driven into the sand of the arena. This too was named palus by the Romans. The Pale of Etymology Latin palus gives several English terms. A well-known phrase in Irish history is ‘beyond the pale.’ A pale is a stick with a pointed end meant to be driven into the ground, a stake, a boundary peg, a fence stake. Fans of old western movies will remember early forts built by pioneers conquering the American West. Such forts were almost always surrounded by a palisade, a high fence of medium-thick local tree trunks sharpened at one end and driven into prairie ground, the word ultimately from old Spanish paliçada ‘fence made of pounded stakes,’ through a Middle French form like palissade from French for ‘stake’ palis, Spanish pal. “What You Say, Nigel, is Really Quite Beyond the Pale, Old Chap.” To repeat a stale joke, “Beyond the pale is not where you go when you have kicked the bucket.” Something beyond the pale was anything outside of civil rule, anything beyond the agreed (staked) boundaries of custom and propriety, any opinion or territory in which a traveler might find himself at the mercy of letterless yahoos or thuggish do-badders. Two historical references contributed to the frequent use of the phrase in English. The earliest has to do with Irish history. By the fourteenth century there was a part of Ireland under English control. This “Pale of Dublin” was fenced, with a once guarded boundary. According to the English interlopers, inside the British-controlled Irish Pale of Dublin, culture and human dignity reigned, but beyond the pale the most uncouth depths of Celtic boorishness and beastliness abounded. Inside the pale or palisade, superintending behaviour by the might of armed soldiers was possible, but, beyond the pale, why — a Dhiaa! — a gentleman might be forced to eat a potato or permit an untoward affront by a leprechaun. A locus classicus of the phrase in English prose occurs in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (1837 CE) when Mr. Pott says to Mr. Slurk: “I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct.” Pale of Settlement The next most famous protected area of jurisdiction using the phrase was the Pale of Settlement in Russia in 1791 CE, created by Catherine the Great, who, true to her German origin, positively glowed in the dark with poisonous anti-Semitism. Catherine gave this name to the western border region of Russia, the one area where Jews were allowed to live ghettoized in impoverished shtetlach (Yiddish ‘little towns’). Catherine the Not-So-Great wanted to restrict trade between Jews and native Russians. It wasn’t fair, the empress may have thought, Jews can add and subtract and they're civilized — unlike the barbarous Slavic louts and sword-happy Cossacks sent on horseback pogroms to burn Jewish farms and villages and murder every Jew in sight. But some Jews, useful to Catherine and her court, were allowed to live ‘beyond the pale of settlement.’ The English term was a direct translation of Russian cherta osedlosti ‘boundary of settlement.’ This prison of specified districts restricted Jewish residence in Russia and Russian-occupied Poland from 1791 CE to 1917. But now, gentles, I simply must get back to the pet cage, where I am teaching my Rocky Mountain whistling marmot to hiss the opening bars of several Barbra Streisand songs.