mike's web log/comments

The days do fly by. We had summer solstice this week, meaning that the days are shrinking again. <sob> But this has no effect, it seems, on thinking about words.

Today's new-to-me word came up in passing in someone's Facebook post: odonym. I'm interested in –nym words in general, but I had never run across odonym before; indeed, the term does not appear much in easily accessible dictionaries. Anyway, odonym refers to street names, basically. Per one source, the odo part comes from Greek hodos, meaning "road," and –nym is, well, nym (synonym, antonym, pseudonym, homonym, eponym, etc.): "name."

One might think that the study of street names would have limited scope, but there are actually lots of interesting things to think about in odonymy, like:

• What the differences might be between streets, roads, avenues, boulevards, circles, courts, ways, lanes, etc.
  


• The origins of street names. Broadway was, you know, a broad way (Breede weg in the original Dutch). Wall Street might have referred to an actual wall. Fleet Street in London was close to the River Fleet, long since disappeared. (For details, consult your local odonymist.)
  


• Metaphors based on odonymy: Broadway (for theater), Madison Avenue (for advertising), Wall Street (for the financial industry), skid road (for a derelict area, named after a one-time street in Seattle where logs were "skidded" down to a mill). Nancy Friedman explored one particular metaphor in What Does "Main Street" Mean?
  


• Naming conventions: numbers (Fifth Avenue), themes (trees are popular: Oak Street, Elm Street, Birch Street), and so on. Some cities have street names that are in alphabetic order, as in Denver: Albion-Ash-Bellaire-Birch-Clermont-Cherry-Dexter-Dahlia, etc.

Anyway, think about the word odonym the next time the disembodied voice of your GPS directions completely mangles a street name.

For surprising word origins, today I have sabotage, which of course refers to deliberately wrecking something. The sabot part refers to a kind of wooden shoe; today we'd probably refer to it as a clog. Sabot is probably related to zapato in Spanish and similar words in other Romance languages. (Also to the name Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer.)

How did a wooden shoe come to be associated with malicious mischief? Unclear, it turns out. The story sometimes told that workers would throw their shoes into machines to wreck them seems not to be the origin of sabotage, although maybe they did do that thing. One theory is that wooden shoes are noisy, and that this noise came to be associated with doing something badly. How exactly the sense changed from unintentional to intentional bungling isn't 100% clear, although it might have come via music (wooden shoes = noisy = playing badly = wrecking something, but don't take that one to the bank).

Somewhat interesting fact: the word sabotage is relatively new in English; it dates only from the early 1900s. We borrowed it intact from French.

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