 Avocados originate from South America, where the Aztecs called them ahucatl, after their word for testicle. No explanation required there, although one hopes the analogy was based on shape rather than colour.
As we all know, the Spanish eventually arrived on American shores and, as conquering hordes are apt to do, decided that easier than getting their tongues around the natives' word (yes, I know what you're thinking, and shame on you) was using one of their own words which sounded similar. Thus ahucatl became avocado, the Spanish word for advocate. And there the story could end, but then it wouldn't be much of a story, would it? Another popular name for avocados is alligator pears - again, for obvious reasons, given their dark green, knobbly skin. Now where do you think the word alligator comes from? Well, mis amigos, it's a mangling of the Spanish el legarto, aka the lizard. Isn't that a nice symmetry? Those rotten Spanish conquistadors mess up a perfectly good Aztec word, then us English speakers take their messed up Aztec word and replace it with another word which is, itself, a messed up Spanish word. Ha! Anyone know the Spanish word for karma?
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 I was watching Things to do in Denver When You're Dead a while back, when one of the characters said the word sabotage came about from striking French workers' practice of throwing old wooden shoes - sabots - into machinery to damage it.
That was too good a story to ignore. Turns out, though, that it's probably not true. The word was first recorded in 1910, and it certainly does derive from the French sabot. However, the first usages tended towards the meaning "bungle clumsily" rather than "maliciously damage". It's likely, therefore, that sabotage came about because of how difficult it is to walk in wooden shoes elegantly or without making a lot of noise. During World War I, the current meaning took hold and has endured. Sabot and the English boot both have their roots in the Old French bot. The German film Das Boot is not about footwear but a submarine. (It's also one of the most gripping films you'll ever see.) Foot and footwear fetishism is called podophilia. Careful how you pronounce it. But I digress. In more recent years, sabotage has been borrowed and adapted to give us cybotage, the deliberate undermining of computers, networks and other electronic systems. What you would call the act of throwing a wooden shoe at a computer, then, is anyone's guess, but perhaps sabocybotage would do the trick. Remember where you read it first. |
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