This is Origins in Five. Five minutes, one word, a small story to start the day. Today's word is sabotage. You've all probably heard the story about angry factory workers in France who were fed up with losing their jobs to new textile machines, and they took off their wooden shoes called sabots and hurled them into the gears. The machines jamped and broke and production stopped, and that's where we get the word sabotage from the wooden shoes, the sabots. It's a great story, and one that's often repeated. It was even used in Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, and that's where I first heard it. There's just one problem. It almost certainly never happened. Which is too bad. The shoe throwing story is satisfying. You can picture it, a furious worker, a spinning loom, a wooden clog arcing through the air in slow motion with cheering workers all around. But this is another example of something we've seen on this podcast a few times. A good story that seems right, but isn't quite supported by the available evidence. So what's a different explanation for the etymology of the word sabotage that has more support? Well first of all, we still start with the word sabot. These shoes were worn by French peasants and rural workers. In France, it had long been the custom to compare the slow and clumsy workers to someone wearing wooden shoes. In fact, the French have a phrase for this Trevaille coup de sabot. The association of being clumsy and working with wooden shoes likely came from agricultural workers arriving in cities and factories that were considered unskilled and unaccustomed to the work. Either way, the French verb sabotaire came to mean not just to clatter about in wooden shoes, but to botch or to bungle or to otherwise do a poor job on purpose. Now in the eighteen nineties, a French anarchist named Emile Pouja was looking for a word to describe a specific labor tactic, a tactic where you would deliberately go slow and as a form of protest. Now today we might just describe it as a slowdown strike or a work to rule strike, but Pougeot he coined the noun sabotage from the French verb sabotaire. The idea was not that the workers would wreck the machines, but rather they would just simply work badly, slowly, clumsily, like someone shuffling around in heavy wooden shoes. Now the word entered English in the early 1900s, and the meaning was initially limited. It was around the malicious damaging of an employer's property by workers. But by World War I, it had expanded far beyond labor disputes to mean any deliberate disruption, and it didn't have to do with workers' property or employer's property, but about anything. And that's really the word that we carry today. So the shoe throwing myth is more violent than the real story. But the real story is actually more subversive. Workers did not smash anything, they simply decided together to be terrible at their job on purpose, a collective, deliberate incompetence as a political weapon. That is sabotage, not a flying shoe, just a shrug and a slow shuffle. And that's Origins in Five. One word, one story to start your day.