pillory
It’s 2002 and I am in TK Maxx in Blackpool, trying to get away from the Blairite zeal of the Labour party conference, when I bump into a minister who is similarly unenamoured. “Bill Clinton is here,” he tells me. “They don’t know which woman to sit next to him at the fundraising dinner. Can’t be young. Or attractive. Because of … well, you know.” We do know. There was not a sexual encounter between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (whom he “did not have sexual relations with”) that we had not pored over years earlier. …
She wrote reams of romantic tosh, but she was pilloried as a woman with the wrong appetites. She was not a victim but a sluttish vamp. (Skip the rest)
今回取り上げる語は、pillory /píl(ə)ri/ です。“she was pilloried as a woman ...” とあるので、pillory は「扱う」の意味ではないかと推測しました。以下で意味を確認していきます。
Cambridge Dictionary をみると、“to severely criticize someone, especially in a public way” とあり、LDOCE には “if someone is pilloried, they are publicly criticized by a lot of people, especially in newspapers etc” と定義されていました。さらに『ウィズダム英和辞典』(三省堂書店)をみると、「(1)さらし台にさらす、(2)[be -ried]<人が>笑い物になる」とあります。
語源を OED でみると、“Middle English: from Old French pilori, probably from Provençal espilori (associated by some with a Catalan word meaning ‘peephole’, of uncertain origin).” とありました。peephole は LDOCE に “a small hole in a door or wall that you can see through”と定義され、「のぞき穴」という意味です。
以上のことから、“she was pilloried as a woman …” は「…な女性としてさらし者にされた」と訳をつけることができます。マイナスのニュアンスが強いことがわかりました。(OkaUchi)
