Is origins in five. Five minutes, one word, a small story to start the day. Today's word is boycott. We use the word boycott all the time to describe protests against companies, events, even entire countries. It is a word that is central to many social movements and is a very popular, nonviolent way of getting your message out there and being heard. But unlike many words we've covered, this one doesn't come from Latin or Greek. It actually comes from the name of a person, Captain Charles Boycott, and a very specific event. Let's set the stage. In the mid-1800s, the population of Ireland was overwhelmingly rural and it was a farming economy, but land was concentrated into relatively few hands, many of them absentee landlords. That means that they didn't even live in Ireland, but rather lived abroad in places like England. So you had a lot of tenants who worked the land but didn't own it, and landlords who weren't even around. As you can imagine, conflicts arose between landlords and tenants on a whole bunch of issues, including land consolidation and reasonable rental fees. By 1879, Irish farmers had had enough, and the Irish National Land League was founded. It was a powerful organization that launched the Irish Land War. One of the things they were fighting for was to enable tenant farmers to own their land. In fact, the Land League championed the three F's fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. Now fair rent is self-explanatory. Fixity of tenure means the right of a tenant or employee to remain in their holding or position without fear of arbitrary eviction or termination, provided that the rent is paid. And free sale means the tenant's right to sell their interest in a farm holding to an incoming tenant without landlord interference. Now one of the key strategies of dealing with farmers or land agents who took over farms from the evicted tenants was to socially and economically ostracize them. And that brings us back to Charles Boycott. Charles Boycott was a retired British Army captain who became a land agent in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He worked for an English landlord. His job included collecting rent and when tenants couldn't pay, enforcing evictions. Not surprisingly, he wasn't well liked. After a particularly poor harvest in 1880, tenants asked Charles Boycott to lower rents to take into consideration the lower yield from the crops and therefore lower revenue from the harvest. Not only did Boycott refuse to lower rents, but he responded by trying to evict those who couldn't pay. That's when the community acted. Instead of attacking him physically, they cut him off from society and decided to isolate him. Workers refused to harvest his crops, local businesses wouldn't serve him, even the postman stopped delivering him his mail, and neighbors avoided speaking to him. The situation became so extreme that Boycott had to bring in workers from outside the area, under military protection just to harvest his own fields. The operation cost far more than the crops were worth. It was a financial disaster for Boycott. In fact, within a year he was forced to leave Ireland and return back to England. And as newspapers began reporting on the story, they needed a word to describe this unusual kind of protest. So they used his name to Boycott. Almost overnight, Charles Boycott's name became a verb, meaning to collectively refuse interaction as a form of pressure, and it stuck. It's a rare case where a person's legacy isn't about what they did or their accomplishments, but rather what people refuse to do to them. And that's Origins in Five. One word, one story to start your day.