Today's word: Sabotage

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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