sabotage

You know what ‘sabotage’ is – an awesome song by the Beastie Boys. It also means to deliberately damage or destroy something. And it has an interesting backstory, which I heard on this week’s Wittertainment podcast (currently being broadcast from Mark Kermode’s under-stairs’ cupboard and Simon Mayo’s spare room). So, apparently French labourers in ye olde times used to wear wooden shoes (why?) called ‘sabots’. And when they got pissed off with les crappy working conditions, they’d chuck these wooden shoes into the machinery to break it. So this became known as sabotage. Interesting, right?

Photo by Silvia Trigo on Unsplash.

Well, it would be, except a little bit of internet research reveals that it’s sadly bollocks. Although the word ‘sabotage’ does relate to those painful sounding wooden shoes, no one was hurling them angrily into machinery as a protest. Apparently the French word it comes from, ‘saboter’, actually means ‘to walk noisily’, as you would if you were wearing wooden shoes (probably because you’re saying ‘ouch, why am I wearing shoes made of tree’ every two seconds). This fake news story was made popular by the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Random, I know.

So what’s the real story? Well, ‘sabotage’ first appeared in writing in an 1897 report by two French anarchists (best job title ever), called Émile Pouget and Paul Delassale. They recommended that French labour unions follow in the footsteps of British trade unionists who’d successfully protested bad working conditions using work slowdowns and inefficiencies (apparently we’ve always been good at going on strike). Us Brits called this Ca’ Canny, a Scottish colloquialism which basically means ‘don’t do too much work’ (my mantra). While looking for a French equivalent, Émile came up with ‘sabotage’, inspired by the phrase ‘Travailler a coups de sabots’, or ‘to work as one wearing wooden shoes’, which had long been used to refer to slow workers. It made its way into English in the early 1900s.

Turns out it’s still a quite interesting story, even if it doesn’t involve any angry French shoe throwing.

(With special thanks to the Grammarphobia blog for the info.)

petrichor

Ooh, this is a lovely word. It describes the scent you smell when rain hits dry soil. It’s one of the few words we have for a specific smell – most, like fresh-cut grass or frying bacon, are just descriptions of what they are.

Photo by Zachary Gilseth on Unsplash.

In the words of Jennifer Aniston, here comes the science… So, certain plants exude an oil during dry weather, which is then absorbed by clay-based soil and rocks. When it rains this is released into the air, alongside another compound called geosmin (a metabolic byproduct of bacteria) which is emitted by wet soil. And together they make the smell petrichor. Hmmm, I’m glad someone came up with a nice word for it, cos it sounds gross.

Origin-wise, even though ‘petrichor’ sounds all Latiney or Ancient Greeky, it’s actually quite a modern word. It was coined in 1964 by two researchers called Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G Thomas in the scientific journal Nature. The reason it looks like ye olde word is because our researchers took its parts from Greek. ‘petra’ means ‘stone’ (you can also find this in words like ‘petrified’ and ‘petrol) and ‘ichor’ is basically a fancy word for fluid (it’s also the stuff that flows in the veins of the gods of Greek mythology apparently).

If you’re a fan of Doctor Who then you’ve probably come across ‘petrichor’ already – it was used by the TARDIS as part of a password to open a back-up control room in ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, and was also the name of a perfume that Amy Pond modelled in ‘Closing Time’.

Interesting fact alert: our noses are super sensitive to geosmin – we can detect it at concentrations as low as five parts per trillion (which is good…?). Some scientists think this is because it might have been handy for survival for our ancestors to know when rainy weather was on the way.

ennui

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash.

We’re probably all feeling some ennui at the moment. It’s a French word for being a bit bored and listless. Because it’s French, in my head it involves lots of languid fanning of one’s own face while sighing and lolling about on a chaise longue. And turns out that’s not far wrong.

Ennui comes from an Old French word, enui, meaning ‘annoyance’. That comes from the Latin ‘in odio’ which means ‘hatred’. At some point ‘enui’ gained an extra ‘n’, and became popular in the 18th century to describe the boredom felt by French youth, who were disappointed that the French Revolution hadn’t been as revolutionary as they’d hoped. This left them full of existential angst, AKA ennui. The meaning morphed again a century or so later, becoming a word expressing a dissatisfaction with the modern age and industrialisation. Lots of arty-farty types suffered from ennui at this time, poor lambs, and because of this it was seen as a mark of how clever you were – because the bourgeoisie were far too stupid to worry about important things like the futility of human existence.

The German version of ennui is ‘Weltschmerz’, which literally translates as ‘world pain’. The difference between the German and French versions is the whole listlessness thing – the Germans are just sad, without all the lying around. I guess they’re just too efficient for that #nationalstereotypes

groggy

Old Grog himself

To feel groggy is to feel slow or weak, for example after a bad night’s sleep, a bump on the head or a hella awesome night out (remember those?). Groggy is derived from ‘grog’ which these days means any kind of booze. But it used to refer purely to the watered-down rum that was issued to sailors of our very own Royal Navy. It’s named after one Admiral Edward Vernon, a British naval officer and MP. He was known for wearing a cloak made from a material called ‘grogham’ (a mixture of silk and wool – also called grosgrain) which earned him the nickname ‘Old Grog’. Despite having a long and distinguished career in the Navy, he’s most remembered for his order in 1740 that his sailors’ neat rum ration should be watered down. The resulting weak drink became known as ‘grog’.

It’s not all bad news. The first president of Murica George Washington had an estate named Mount Vernon in honour of Ed – George’s older bro Lawrence served under him. He obviously made an impression, and the estate is still called Mount Vernon to this day.

I’d like to think that Old Grog was maybe the inspiration for Old Gregg from ‘The Mighty Boosh’, but this is complete speculation on my part (I can’t find any history of Old Grog having a blinding mangina for a start). Despite that, here’s a video of Old Gregg and Howard Moon singing ‘Love Games’ – because I think we could all do with a bit more Boosh in our lives right now.