3 min
Remember, Remember
November is the month when British loyalists around the world burn images of Guy Fawkes, to celebrate the failure of the desperate political intrigues that almost blew up the English Parliament on November 5, 1605. The traditional patriotic rhyme puts it this way: “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.” This Word Stories instalment invites you instead to remember the intriguing stories of some common words associated with Guy Fawkes Day.
guy
On November 5, 1605, an Englishman named Guy Fawkes was caught trying to blow up the Parliament building. (He and his fellow Catholic conspirators saw James I as much too Scottish and Protestant.) A number of plotters were arrested and executed, but Fawkes was the one caught red-handed in the building with the gunpowder, so when people started to celebrate the group’s failure with bonfires on November 5, they began to burn an effigy called a Guy (W. Burrell, Letters, 1806). This villainous scarecrow figure inspired a new meaning of the slang term Guy: any person whose appearance was seen as dreadful (J. C. Maitland, Letters from Madras, 1836). As time went by, the negative connotations connected to Guy Fawkes weakened to the point that a guy simply meant “a fellow”. By the turn of the same century, an English speaker could address a group of men as “you guys” with a casual but neutral feeling (G. Ade, Artie, 1896), for example, and this is the way the word is commonly used today. In some dialects, the plural guys has been further extended to include women as well as men (especially in phrases like Hey guys or you guys), despite the potential problems involved in using masculine umbrella terms to refer to mixed groups (Washington Post, July 7, 2021).
parliament
The roots of the word parliament stretch back through French to Latin and Greek. In ancient Greek, the verb ballein meant “to throw” or “to place”, and the derivative noun bolē referred to an instance of throwing or placing something. By further extension, a parabolē (combining para- meaning “beside” with bolē meaning “placing”) meant something like “comparison”—evoking a deliberate act of placing two things side by side. This Greek compound is the source of the English word parable, referring to the more specific action of considering two story elements side by side. By means of a less direct route, parabolē also gave us the word parliament.
Classical Latin borrowed parabolē (“comparison”) as parabola (“comparison”), but as centuries went by, Latin speakers began to use the term in extended senses like “reasoning” or “discussion”. Eventually, in post-Classical Latin, the verbal form parabolare just meant “to talk”—a term inherited by French as parler (“to talk”).
In the fifteenth century, English speakers borrowed parler as parley, meaning “speech” in general, and then narrowed its sense in the sixteenth century to mean what it still means today in English: a “temporary truce talk”. English also borrowed the French noun parlement (literally “talking”) in the fourteenth century to refer to formal discussions (as in The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, c. 1300) and also the kinds of deliberative assemblies that might meet for the sake of such important discussions (as in the Early South English Legendary, c. 1300). Only the latter sense survives in English today: a parliament is a formal deliberative assembly—almost always governmental in nature. More idiomatically, though, a group of owls is traditionally called a parliament of owls in English—presumably in honour of the sacred owl associated with the goddess Athena, ancient Greece’s patroness of sound reasoning and good government.
sabotage
Sabotage is the action of intentionally undermining something or someone, and the derivative verb to sabotage means to engage in such behaviour. The roots of sabotage are found in the French term sabot (“wooden shoe”), and one popular folk etymology claims that it comes from disgruntled nineteenth-century French workers throwing their wooden shoes into factory machinery. The picture is a fanciful one, but the true story of the word sabotage does indeed involve wooden shoes and labour disputes.
Many working people and rustic types did indeed wear sabots (“wooden shoes”) at one time in France, and the French derivative sabotage (attested in the seventeenth century) referred to the action of clomping around like an unrefined person in wooden shoes. By further derivation, sabotage later came to refer to the action of doing clumsy, ineffective work (attested in the late nineteenth century). A century later, the dominant modern meaning of sabotage finally emerged (in French and then in English) when workers in France began to push for better labour laws by undermining their own work on purpose. French bakers were therefore said to be engaging in sabotage, for example, when they deliberately made the company’s bread smell strange (The Daily People, July 15, 1906). The usage spread quickly in English, and sabotage was soon applied to any kind of subterfuge—especially one involving stealth (Sydney Morning Herald, 1918). The noun also gave rise in English to a new verb with similarly wide applicability: to sabotage something or somebody means to attack them using such subterfuge (Nottingham Evening Post, 1918). When people use the word today in everyday speech, they are unlikely to be thinking about the French working class of the Industrial Revolution or their loud wooden shoes.
