More Word and Phrase Origins
From: Leonardcln@aol.com
More Railroad Word and Phrase Origins:
"picking up the slack"
"tell-tale sign"
"full head of steam"
"the real McCoy"
posted from CPRR Discussion Group at 6:25 PM
Thursday, October 04, 2007
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3 Comments:
From: GUSHARD@aol.com
"Dead End"
—Wayne Gushard
Can anyone verify whether the phrase "Dead End" was originally railroad terminology as suggested by Wayne Gushard?
From: KyleWyatt@aol.com
I can't speak to "Dead End" – Certainly no specifically railroad association comes to my mind.
As to
Sabotage – "the practice by striking French railway workers of cutting the sabot [metal shoe] that held railroad tracks in place. The word appears in English in 1910 and early use specifically refers to the French railroad strikers."
My understanding has always been that this work derived from (French) anti-industrial workers that threw their sabots (wooden shoes) into factory gears to break them. I never heard a railroad association before.
On sabotage, the following is by far the most extensive, and appears to support the much earlier origin of Sabotage.
See also the following
Wikipedia raises questions about this definition, but doesn't present particularly compelling evidence for its own much later railroad origins of the word.
Dictionary.com dates the origins of the word back to 1865-70. See here for Sabot.
Also scroll down here to "Sabotage."
A more thorough discussion is here and also here.
—Kyle
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