The result was keep; already moved back prior to this close. - Daniel.Bryant 10:18, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This is not adequately sourced in my opinion, and the only reference for a "pear of anguish" comes from a website called "Occasional Hell" that also had this to say: it is not known whether the goatse.cx man has ever used this device. The closest thing we have to a reliable source, the Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, does not corroborate the bulk of the material presented, nor does it even refer to the item by the same title. Is there something to work with here, or are we grasping at straws? RFerreira 07:31, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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(help) for example. Alexandre Dumas, père has one character mention a "poire d'angoisse" in chapter 22 of Twenty Years After (albeit that, unlike the authors of fiction who relish in giving gruesome descriptions of the thing, he doesn't specify what it actually is). Looking for non-fiction we come up rather short:
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(help)As for the instrument of robbery: The sources that confirm the idea are either fiction or sensationalism. (As Securiger points out on the article's talk page, there's a lot of contamination of early 20th century scholarship by these fictions, too.) The sources that are actually reliable themselves cast doubt upon the whole idea. They confirm that an ordinary pear-shaped gag, without all of the acoutrements of springs, spikes, and keys, is known as a "poire d'angoisse" (and that's probably, from the context of the story, what Dumas was referring to).
I have found no sources that confirm that this is an instrument of torture. Even the (reliable) sources from the 20th and 21st centuries that take devices from museums, of unknown provenance, and (like Frank above) hypothesize what they might be, don't hypothesize a torture device.
Therefore: I think that there's enough from the above to make an article, especially given Eldridge's debuking of the idea and the abundance of sources that tell us that these are varieties of fruit. Keep, rename back to choke pear (per our Wikipedia:Naming conventions), and feel free to write an article. Uncle G 13:40, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]