Sabotage

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /ˈsæ.bəˌtɑːʒ/

Definitions

Deliberate destruction or obstruction of something to prevent it from succeeding or functioning properly
Willful hampering or wrecking of work, equipment, or plans to thwart progress or functionality
The intentional act of damaging or obstructing to prevent proper operation or success

Etymology: In the summer of 1906 the Daily People, a New York socialist paper, ran an article on the French labour movement. The French workers, it said, had a tactic called “sabotage”, and the writer added: “I try to translate that word as ‘go-canny.’” It was an apt translation. The French had borrowed the tactic from Britain, where it went by very nearly that name, and he was handing it back its Scots name. The first sabots on record are toys. Etymonline dates the word to the thirteenth century, but the earliest dated records in the Trésor de la langue française, the great dictionary of French, come from early in the fourteenth century: a manuscript that mentions “caboz torneiz”, spinning tops, and, late in that century, “sabos”, tops again. The clog, a peasant shoe hollowed out of a single block of wood, is not on record until 1512, though it is probably the older meaning, merely slower to reach the page. Where “sabot” comes from is uncertain. The Trésor takes it as probably a dialect word for a clog in Poitou, “bot”, crossed with “savate”, an old shoe. Others take it straight from “savate”, whose relatives run across southern Europe, among them Spanish “zapato” and Italian “ciabatta”, and whose own origin is unknown; a Tatar word for overshoes and a Persian word for a leather shoe have both been suggested. The clog is on record in English by 1607, in a translation that mentions “Woodden shoes properly called sabots”. The French verb stayed loyal to the toy for a long time. In 1564 “saboter” meant to play with a top, and as late as 1878 that was the only sense the Académie française would give it. In ordinary speech it had moved on. By 1690 it meant to clatter about in clogs, and by 1808 it meant to botch, to rush a job through anyhow. A bad violin could be called a “sabot”, and to “saboter” a piece of music was to play it badly. How the clatter turned into the botching is not settled. The usual explanation is the clumsy clog-wearer, working, as the French said, “à coups de sabots”, with blows of the clog. Another possibility is an old verb for shaking and knocking about, recorded in Provençal as “sabotar” in the twelfth century and in French as “sabotter”, to torment or ill-treat, in 1640. Neither is certain. The tactic itself had a Scots name, and its most famous outing was in Glasgow. In 1889 the Glasgow dockers struck for an extra halfpenny an hour, and the employers brought in farm hands to replace them. The strike failed, but the strikebreakers had worked very slowly, and at a meeting on 5 July the dockers of Edward McHugh’s new union resolved to go back and give the employers the same kind of labour. For two or three days they went “canny”, gently, and according to Pouget, the French anarchist who later told the story, and to later labour histories, the go-slow won the halfpenny that the strike had not. In 1897 Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote that it was the only case they knew of a union urging its members to slacken off without warning the employer. Émile Pouget, a journalist, is said to have begun arguing for the idea in 1895, the year he later called its “theoretical consecration”. In September 1897 the congress of the Confédération générale du travail at Toulouse heard a report from the commission it had set up on the boycott, with Paul Delesalle as its spokesman and Pouget among its signatories. The tactic, the report said, had come from England, where it was known as “Gocanny”, and it explained the name with a little scene: two men walking along, one telling the other to go gently and take his ease. The French version, the commission proposed, would be called “le sabottage”, with two t’s, and its rule was “mauvaise paye, mauvais travail”: bad pay, bad work, aimed at the quality of the job rather than its speed. Nobody spoke against it, and the report was adopted unanimously. That same month Pouget used both noun and verb in this sense in his paper, Le Père Peinard. Years later he wrote that the word had been mere slang, meaning to work clumsily as if with blows of the clog, until the Toulouse congress gave it its “syndical baptism”. He is often credited with coining it, as the socialist writer John Spargo did in 1913, but the noun already existed, for the Trésor records it from 1846 for making clogs; what Pouget and the Toulouse congress gave it was its labour sense. Then it hardened. By 1907 a French dictionary was using “saboter” for wrecking industrial equipment on purpose, and in 1909 the economist Charles Gide’s textbook was using the noun for physical acts that stop a service, a business or a machine from working. Pouget himself allowed for damaging machines as well as bad work, but the historian Pinsolle finds that the word at first meant mainly a secret lowering of the quality of work, and that it came to stand for paralysing the country after the postal strike of 1909 and the railway strike of 1910. On 8 October 1910 a railway strike began at La Chapelle in Paris, and within days it had spread across France. Wires were cut, the prime minister, Aristide Briand, called up the railwaymen of the Nord network for military service, and warrants were issued against union men accused of sabotage. Briand spoke of a criminal enterprise of violence, disorder and sabotage, and the word crossed the Channel and the Atlantic in earnest. William Z. Foster reported from Paris for the Industrial Worker, the paper of the Industrial Workers of the World, putting home-made forms such as “saboters” and “saboted” in inverted commas. In London the Socialist Standard explained it as “the destruction of machinery and the precipitation of accidents”, and in November the Church Times was “deploring the sabotage of the French railway strikers”. That year Bill Haywood of the IWW, touring Europe, is said to have seen the tactic at work. In the United States the IWW made the word its own, and in 1916 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s pamphlet said that it meant, primarily, “the withdrawal of efficiency”. The First World War gave it a uniform. In 1918 a dictionary of military terms defined it as wanton destruction to embarrass or injure an enemy, from smashing machinery to flooding mines. That August a Nottingham paper quoted another newspaper’s verdict that the war was being “sabotaged”, and soon almost anything could be: in 1934 the composer Constant Lambert wrote that the atonal school had “sabotaged the moribund romantic tradition”. Its agent, the saboteur, crossed with it. In the next war there were saboteurs working for the Allies, and by the late 1970s there were saboteurs in the English hunting field. Which leaves the story everyone knows: that angry workers threw their wooden shoes into the machinery. It is told of weavers wrecking the new Jacquard looms, of factory hands in Liège, of Dutch workers in the fifteenth century, and in 1991 a Vulcan officer in Star Trek VI explained the word this way. It is a good picture, but Etymonline notes that it “is not supported by the etymology”, and Grammarphobia found “no evidence that any sabots were ever tossed into any machinery”. The dictionaries trace the word to bungling, not throwing, and its working life began as bad work for bad pay. A second story is rarer but has a stranger grain of truth. In 1923 Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable said the word came into use after the great French railway strike of 1912, when strikers cut the “shoes” that held the rails. The strike was in 1910, and the labour sense was already on record in 1897. But French railways really had known a “sabotage”: in 1870 it was the name for fixing the chairs that hold the rails onto the sleepers, and on the roads a “sabot” was also the iron shoe slipped under a carriage wheel to brake it. Behind the rail-shoes story there may lie that old technical word, remembered in the wrong place and pinned to the wrong strike.

Synonyms: undermine, destabilize, thwart, interfere, damage

Antonyms: support, assist, facilitate, aid, promote