Now, the VOA Special English program "Words and Their Stories".
A kangaroo court(私设的法庭) is a kind of court that often takes the law into its own hands. A kangaroo court may be a real court that does not make decisions fairly. Its judge may be dishonest or unwise. Or it may not be a court at all.
A kangaroo court may be a group of people who hold a trial without any right to do so. Prisoners in a jail or prison sometimes hold kangaroo courts to decide if another prisoner has broken some unwritten rule of prison life.
The expression kangaroo court began to be used about 150 years ago. There are a number of different stories that seek to explain how it became part of the language. One writer believes it came into use at the time when stories about Australia and its fast jumping kangaroos were popular in America.
This story says judges on the American frontier had to travel long distances to hold trials in different parts of their territory. Often, how much they were paid depended on how far they travelled and how many trials they held. And usually the money came from payments or fines that judges ordered the defendants to pay. As a result, trials were short and not always fair. This story claimed that these courts became known as kangaroo courts, because the judges jumped quickly like a kangaroo from one town to the next.
Another story says the expression was born earlier when Australia, the land of the kangaroo was a British prison colony. The story says the name, kangaroo, was given to the illegal courts prisoners held in Australian prisons. The name is still used to describe illegal trials held by prisoners in jails and prisons. In some prisons, officials did not interfere, because they believed kangaroo courts helped to keep order.
The third story says the expression began in the California gold fields in the eighteen hundreds. A writer says gold miners used the name of the jumping animal from Australia to describe the courts that tried men for seizing or jumping mining claims of another man. Stealing someone else's gold mine was a serious crime. A crime severely punished by a kangaroo court.
People still use the expression to describe illegal or unfair courts. Sometimes, they even use kangaroo court to criticize a decision by a perfectly fair and legal court because they do not agree with the court's decision.
This VOA Special English program "Words and Their Stories" was written by Nancy Steinbach. The narrator was Maurice Joyce. I'm Warren Shier.
