the.com/saboteur
The coworker nodding along in the meeting, planning your downfall in the parking lot.
means Someone who secretly damages or undermines an effort from the inside.
from From French saboteur, rooted in sabot, the wooden clog worn by workers. The popular story says striking laborers hurled sabots into machinery to jam the gears — a vivid tale, but most etymologists treat it as folklore. More soberly, the verb saboter originally meant to work clumsily or 'clog along' like someone stomping in wooden shoes, and it drifted toward meaning deliberate bungling or sabotage of labor and industry around the early 1900s, when the word entered English alongside the labor movements that popularized it.
- origin
- from sabots, wooden shoes tossed into machinery
- etymology myth
- workers did not actually throw clogs in gears
- modern form
- usually a slow email, not an explosion
- game night
- also a card game about ruining mine expeditions