Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
TRAMMEL
When we are all tied up or entangled in a situation from which it's difficult to extricate ourselves, we can complain that we are trammeled
The verb trammel (pronounced TRAM-uhl), "to entangle," "to confine," "to restrain or shackle," comes to us from the Latin tremaculum, a fishing net, ultimately from macula, "mesh.
The noun originally identified a fishing net that combines fine mesh and loose mesh, then later a kind of hobble to keep a horse from kicking. The sense of entanglement informs the verb, which in the sixteenth century meant to bind a corpse, later to catch fish or birds in a net, and now to us in the generalized, metaphorical sense.
Example: From Edward J. Esler, "Is the Constitution Color Blond?" in USA Today Magazine, July 2004: "Class redresses will afford benefits to some who have not been injured and trammel the rights of some who have not perpetrated injuries."