Ordeal
Saturday 28 January, I was
watching a TV program in French with English subtitles when I came across the
word ORDEAL. The context it came about seemed to me so
out of place that I wanted to know more about the word. Let me give you a
little bit of this context. “Epicerie
Fine” is a show on TV5, which aims to discover astonishing local flagship
produce of the French gastronomy. It is presented/hosted by Guy Martin. Guy
Martin is a French Chef at the Grand Véfour a
gastronomic restaurant in Paris member
of the Relais & Châteaux association.
Watching French TV with English subtitles is a little pleasure of mine,
as I love to see how other people translate some terms. The topic of the day
was the Chestnut of Corsica. The documentary explained how difficult it is to pick
up chestnuts during the harvest season and the translator chose to translate
the word “pénible”, which according to Larousse means hard, tough, tiring, laborious, or even
tiresome.
By choosing to use the word ordeal
which means a painful or
horrific experience, especially a protracted one according to The
Oxford English Dictionary where they a myriad of other more obvious
choices got me thinking; Isn’t translating “pénible” in this particular
context, by ordeal a little bit of an exaggeration? Though the meaning of both
words (pénible and ordeal) is quite close, the usage is very different. In the
French language, pénible is widely used, it is we can say a very common word
that we would use to describe misbehaving children, to describe the weather and
many other very trivial situations. We use “pénible”, like we would
use hard, difficult or annoying in English it is to say, everyday. However the word Ordeal in English is not
that frequently used. We would use it in very rare occasion and to describe
almost unbearable situations.
The
reason I find the choice of the word out of place is that I thought the term ordeal
was only used in extreme situations such as slavery, agonising pain and death,
torture I mean real tough stuff. Gathering chestnut may not be pleasant but
it’s not penal servitude or penal labour.
I
decided to put all my assumptions aside and researched on the etymology and
origins of the word ordeal.
According
to the The Free Dictionary an
ordeal is defined as a particularly difficult and/or painful experience.
According
to the “World’s most trusted dictionaries (yes, I meant Oxford Dictionaries)
the origin of the word is ordāl, ordēl, Old English word of
Germanic origin related to German Urteilen “give judgement”.
Historically ordeals
are also medieval judicial procedures called Trial By Ordeal aiming at judging
the guilt or innocence of an accused criminal. A medieval superstition called
iudicium Dei latin for Judgement of God is at the origin of this practice:
Priest in the Middle Age believed that God condemned the guilty and exonerated
the innocent through physical tests lead by the clergy. They would ask
the defendant to thrust his arm into a cauldron of boiling water and fish out a
ring or dunk the defendant in a pool and if the defendant was unharmed or healed
he was found innocent, if the defendant refused the trial by ordeal he was
assumed guilty. The principle was similar to that of trial by combat it
was based on the hypothesis that God would help the innocent by performing a
miracle.
People
in other cultures have used similar practices to trial their accused criminals. For example in Nigeria and in Sierra Leone trials
by ingestion of poisonous food such as the Calabar Bean or called Esere in
Nigeria or the bark of a tree, (called Redwater ordeal) in Sierra Leone were
common practice[1]. Observation
of these practices in Nigeria and Sierra Leone were first reported respectively
in 1864[2]
and 1803[3] Though
some people affirm that their practices were more magical than faith based the
principle remains the same Ordeals have actually been studied in depth by Peter
T. Leeson. Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George
Mason University Leeson wrote a paper on ordeals in which he argues « that
medieval judicial ordeals accurately assigned accused criminals guilt and
innocence. »[4] It
is a paper worth Reading.
I am not denying the fact
that bending down all day to pick up chestnuts is hard but it’s not the same as
being burned alive or dunked into water. So Is it really an ordeal?!
In French
we have a saying to describe situations that may be difficult but are still
surmountable: ”Ce n’est pas le bagne” which can be translated by “Its not a
penal servitude” or to use an analogy historically closer to us “It’s not the labour
camp”, well I can now make up my own saying “It’s not an ordeal!”
[1] John Uri
Lloyd, PHYSOSTIGMA VENENOSUM (CALABAR), Reprinted from the western Druggist,
Chicago, June, 1897
[3]
Winterbottom, Account of the Colony of Sierra Leone,
1863 ? Vol. I, p. 129 and Wm. Procter, On Erythrophleum Judiciale, the
Sassy Bark Tree of Cape Palmas, Amer. Journ. Pharm., 1852, p. 195.
[4] Leeson, Peter
T., Ordeals (January 10, 2010). Journal of Law and Economics, Forthcoming.
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1530944
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