Does the phrase work actually come from “tripalium”? | EUROtoday

On May 12, 2025

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HAS What are the phrases for? To identify, to categorise, to make the actual somewhat clearer. But additionally they do one thing else: they information a approach of seeing. Their roots, usually forgotten, generally say greater than their makes use of. Take a profitable phrase within the managerial newspeter: collaborate, from Latin collaboration“Work with”. A versatile components, with out exact contours. No hierarchy, no widespread path: everyone seems to be advancing, in parallel with others, with out essentially crossing. To cooperate is one thing else. And for good cause, cooperarein Latin, means “to do a common work”. The phrase supposes an intention, a administration, a challenge. Behind this apparently mild shade, two visions of labor oppose: on the one hand, a free, horizontal form; On the opposite, a structured group, turned in the direction of the success of a standard goal.

When LinkedIn replays the traditional torture

And then there may be this phrase that we communicate of as if he alone has a forgotten fact. We meet it all over the place: on LinkedIn, on the cabinets devoted to non-public improvement, even in administration classes. Always accompanied by the identical anecdote, repeated as somewhat effectively -oiled mantra. The phrase work would come from Latin tripalium (type), an instrument with three piles used for torture. The picture is tough. But it’s simply important. It offers which means, virtually a justification for a fatigue that many share. Maybe if the work hurts, it’s as a result of it has at all times been considered effectively. A passage accepted by all for what it permits to acquire: an earnings, an government and a few compensation.

Read too “We have switched to idiocracy”: when the incompetent climb the ladder “The first time I heard this story was in the final year,” recollects Cyprien Philonenko who teaches philosophy to highschool college students. His trainer had slipped it at first of the course, to introduce a debate on work. The picture had marked. She sounded proper. Too truthful, perhaps, to be actually mentioned. No surprise she circulates all over the place. “This idea is even taken up by certain linguists, who relay it in the media on the occasion of the Labor Day, the 1^er May, ”notes Mariette Darrigrand, semiologist and author of Tripalium workshop (Éditions les Ecreurs, 2024), whose subtitle announces the color: No, work does not come from torture!

So yes, this quarrel on the origin of the word work could pass for a simple argument of specialists. A detail at the bottom of the page, without much range. And yet. If this version is so consensus, it may be that it touches something deeper. Work is no longer seen as a promise, but as a weight. No longer a path to emancipation, but a burden that is supported, for lack of being able to do otherwise. “The etymology retraces an origin, not a manual, recalls Albin Wagener, head of the Master Sciences Human and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Lille. Words change, slide, sometimes take the opposite of their root. What matters is the way a word is anchored in its time, the way in which it circulates, and what we decide to see it. »»

The weight of a religious heritage

In the case of the word work, it is precisely the root that poses a problem. If tripalium Is not the right track, when you have to believe? What is really the origin of this word that we pronounce, without measuring all the imagination he carries in him? To try to understand, you have to go back, reopen the dictionaries, follow the traces.

“The phrase tripalium is absent from the Gaffiot, the reference dictionary of basic Latin ”, notes Mariette Darrigrand. It isn’t a surprise, in line with her: this time period doesn’t belong to the Latin of Caesar, however to a later Latin, reinterpreted effectively after the autumn of Rome. Tripalium solely appeared within the sixth century, in non secular texts. Under the pen of Catholic monks, the phrase is a part of a imaginative and prescient of the world the place struggling buildings human life. You will give delivery in ache, you’ll work laborious to deserve salvation. The physique suffers after which, the soul rises. In this logic, she explains, earthly life turns into a collection of trials. And work, an ethical train, a faculty of persistence and renunciation.

Read too “Help, my superior steals my ideas for me!” »: Pillage, this atypical workplace sportThis story settles in a very long time, even when the reform, within the sixteenth century, introduces a totally totally different mind-set about work. “Protestantism breaks with the idea of an effort to endure pending salvation,” explains Mariette Darrigrand. For Luther and Calvin, work turns into a strategy to be completed and render because of God. Working effectively, rigorously, is already asserting your religion. Work is now not a sentence, however a dedication. The struggling is regularly fading. What stays is the concept of vocation.

In the international locations the place this thought is extra deeply anchored, as in Germany or in Anglo-Saxon international locations, it additionally marks language. “When we compare the imaginations that surround the word work in different languages, we realize that they vary a lot, even when the economic realities are comparable,” observes Albin Wagener. Werk in German and work In English are each associated to historical Greek ergonwhich suggests “doing work”. “What it says,” he continues, “is an idea of manufacturing, common realization. We work to achieve something. In France, the Protestant rupture does not sweep the Catholic heritage. The link between work and pain remains solidly anchored. Tripalium continues on its way. He entered the first dictionaries in the eighteenth century, without really arouse a debate.

First doubts to the quest for real origin

It was not until the 19th century for the first doubts to appear. Among those who raise the eyebrow: Émile Littré. In 1860, the author of Grand Dictionary of Medicine is embarking on a new dictionary project. The etymology of work intrigues. That of tripalium seems wobbly to him. “That the I turns into an A is feasible. But the P which turns into V, he doesn’t consider it. This type of mutation is just not seen, ”explains Mariette Darrigrand.

The lexicographer advances one other monitor, extra coherent in his eyes: the foundation trabsin Latin, which suggests “beam”. The phrase would have gave trabe, trave, then work, in reference to wooden, its transformation, the trouble it implies. He would have first designated the work of wooden, central in antiquity, earlier than encompassing the instruments, the manufacturing, then, extra broadly, any type of productive exercise. According to the semiologist, this root additionally gave span, hindering. The thought right here is just not that of torture, however of a constraint. The struggling related to the phrase work, from its first makes use of, wouldn’t come from a torture, however from what the animal that one hinders to deal with or ferrrer feels.

But non secular heritage is just not sufficient to elucidate the persistence of tripalium. For Mariette Darrigrand, if the picture continues to flow into within the nineteenth century, regardless of its linguistic weaknesses, it’s as a result of it finds an echo elsewhere. At Marx, specifically. At that point, the metaphor modified register. It turns into a rhetorical device, a lever to denounce. The work, in line with Marx, ought to lengthen man, permit him to attain himself in what he does. But the economic revolution breaks this momentum. The gestures are fragmented, the our bodies bend. The work is self -employed, turns into outdoors of oneself. He doesn’t specific something anymore, now not belongs to anybody. And on this imposed mechanism, it is part of the human which disappears. In this studying, tripalium Summarizes every part: ache, constraint, the impossibility of residing in what we do. He crystallizes what trendy work, as Marx observes it, radically prevents: turning into oneself.

When the actual strikes the which means of phrases

What this analysis across the phrase work highlights is that etymology is just not sufficient to elucidate every part. And above all, if we proceed to cling to the picture of tripaliumit isn’t by attachment to the Latin roots, however as a result of it echoes a shared sensation. Deaf fatigue, a sense of constraint, an more and more shared type of weariness. “The etymology suggests, in hollow, what our society projects on this word,” observes Albin Wagener. For him, the query is now not in vocabulary. It crosses retraining accounts, resignations with out clarification, silent resistances, the rise of freelance work or the space from hierarchies. Signs that we overlook and which testify to a displacement.

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Answer

So sure, perhaps discomfort doesn’t come from work in itself, however from what has turn out to be. Of the place he occupies in our lives. Of the which means we want to discover there. Of the steadiness that we hope to take care of. From this concept, too, that work may very well be sufficient to outline us. But can we actually ask him as a lot? This is why language counts. The phrases that we use regularly form the best way wherein it’s inhabited. They accompany practices, generally affect them. Their which means isn’t steady. He slides, shifts, finally ends up now not saying what we thought was.

This is, little doubt, all of the energy of language. Nothing prohibits an organization to redefine what it places behind a phrase as work. Nor to query what she continues to count on. But re -enact tripaliumis to make etymology a refuge. A narrative that reassures, as a result of it simplifies. And surrender, maybe, to suppose so in any other case.

https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/le-mot-travail-vient-il-vraiment-de-tripalium-12-05-2025-2589339_28.php