Sabotage (Random Happenstance)

Ever wondered where this term comes from... sabotage? I did not.

Until yesterday, when reading my current pastime (Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson), I stumbled across it. I'd never have remembered the mere occurrence of that word, but Stephenson - as is his habit, which endears his books so much to me - cleverly inlined an explanation into the storyline (a historical account of how the introduction of horizontal windmill wheels for silver mining was attempted in the late 17th century) without disrupting it.

And guess what, today upon opening my browser, the starting page (Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day) presents this:

The Word of the Day for June 3 is:

sabot • \sa-BOH\ Audio icon • noun
1 *a : a wooden shoe worn in various European countries b (1) : a strap across the instep in a shoe especially of the sandal type (2) : a shoe having a sabot strap
2 : a thrust-transmitting carrier that positions a missile in a gun barrel or launching tube and that prevents the escape of gas ahead of the missile
3 : a dealing box designed to hold several decks of playing cards

Example sentence:
"All her kind, at least in the countryside, wore . . . sabots, well past the century's end." (Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle)

Did you know?
The term "sabot" may have first been introduced into English in a 1607 translation from French: "Wooden shoes," readers were informed, are "properly called sabots." The gun-related sense appeared in the mid-1800s with the invention of a wooden gizmo that kept gun shells from shifting in the gun barrel. Apparently, someone thought the device resembled a wooden shoe and named it "sabot" (with later generations of this device carrying on the name). Another kind of French sabot—a metal "shoe" used to secure rails to railway ties—is said to be the origin of the word "sabotage," from workers destroying the sabots during a French railway strike in the early 1900s. The word "sabot" is probably related to "savate," a Middle French word for an old shoe.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

This deservedly climbs to one of the top places in my personal Random-Happenstance-Which-Is-Very-Improbable list.