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Jacquard loom: Difference between revisions
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===Sabotage!=== | ===Sabotage!=== | ||
The Jacquard loom put many textile workers out of a job. It is said — implausibly, it seems — that these weavers who, with the fashion at the time, wore wooden French [[clogs]] called “''sabots''”, not best pleased with being pitched into [[redundancy]] — threw their clogs into the delicate machinery, wreaking havoc. This practice became so popular they gave it a name: “sabotage”. | The Jacquard loom put many textile workers out of a job. It is said — implausibly, it seems — that these weavers who, with the fashion at the time, wore wooden French [[clogs]] called “''sabots''”, not best pleased with being pitched into [[redundancy]] — threw their clogs into the delicate machinery, wreaking havoc. This practice became so popular they gave it a name: “sabotage”. | ||
Friendly buzz-killers have since written to advise that the word did not reach the common idiom until the start of the 20th century, so clog-throwing weavers “is not supported by the etymology”. Rather, sabotage was originally a kind of [[work-to-rule]]: to work so slowly and clumsily as to resemble a peasant, peasants being in the habit of wearing wooden clogs — hence sabotage which, we suppose, means “cloggishness”. | |||
In the mean time the poor, truculent, bare-footed hand-weavers has no time to throw their clogs in the loom or enjoy their new-found “leisure”, much less to pen think-pieces about [[technological unemployment]] or [[universal basic income]], for they were urgently needed to programme, maintain and enhance these fancy new automatic looms. They re-specialised. Now their skill was ''programming the Jacquard loom'' and ''designing faster, fancier, more flexible Jacquard looms''.<ref>Now, no doubt, some of them couldn’t figure out how to switch it on, failed to become programmers, and had a lousy time. This happens.</ref> | In the mean time the poor, truculent, bare-footed hand-weavers has no time to throw their clogs in the loom or enjoy their new-found “leisure”, much less to pen think-pieces about [[technological unemployment]] or [[universal basic income]], for they were urgently needed to programme, maintain and enhance these fancy new automatic looms. They re-specialised. Now their skill was ''programming the Jacquard loom'' and ''designing faster, fancier, more flexible Jacquard looms''.<ref>Now, no doubt, some of them couldn’t figure out how to switch it on, failed to become programmers, and had a lousy time. This happens.</ref> | ||