Please share your favorite interesting words and their history with me.

Origin

Sabotage is a term of French origin coined during the railway strike of 1910, when workers destroyed the wooden shoes, or sabots, that held rails in place, thus impeding the morning commute. An alternate definition pretends the word to be older by almost a century, the times of Industrial Revolution. It is said that powered looms could be damaged by angry or disgruntled workers throwing their wooden shoes or clogs (known in French as sabots, hence the term Sabotage) into the machinery, effectively clogging the machinery. This is often referenced as one of the first inklings of the Luddite Movement. However, this etymology is highly suspect and no wooden shoe sabotage is known to have been reported from the time of the word's origin. [1] Others contend that the word comes from the slang name for people living in rural areas who wore wooden shoes after city dwellers had begun wearing leather shoes; when employers wanted strikebreakers they would import 'sabots'/rural workers to replace the strikers. Not used to machine-driven labor the 'sabots' worked poorly and slowly. The strikers would be called back to work (with demands won) and, could win demands on the job by working like their country cousins - the sabots. Thus 'sabotage'.

(libi), I am so very glad you're on this site. :)

(i copied the above because i am lazy, but it's the reason i've been able to start wearing the color pink)

triangles, thank you :)

heh, interesting.

film:
filmen "membrane, skin," from W.Gmc. *filminjan (cf. O.Fris. filmene "skin," O.E. fell "hide"), extended from P.Gmc. *fello(m) "animal hide," from PIE *pello-/*pelno- (cf. Gk. pella, L. pellis "skin"). Sense of "a thin coat of something" is 1577, extended by 1845 to the coating of chemical gel on photographic plates. By 1895 this also meant the coating plus the paper or celluloid. First used of "motion pictures" in 1905. The verb "to make a movie of" is from 1899.

SNAFU is an acronym meaning roughly, "things are in a mess — as usual". The most commonly accepted rendering is "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up". It is sometimes given as "Situation Normal: All Fouled Up" or similar[1], in circumstances where profanity is discouraged or censored. In modern usage, "snafu" is often used as an interjection, as a shorthand for the sentiment expressed by the phrase. "Snafu" is also sometimes used as a noun or verb, referring to a situation that suddenly went awry, or the cause of the trouble. The acronym is believed to have originated in the US Army during World War II.

emulsion: a mixture of two liquids that do not disolve (immiscible [also a fave]} within each other.
A froth (also a good word).
The name of the coating that goes on the paper or celluloid to make libi's lovely word.

Muscle

1533, from the Latin musculus "a muscle," literally "little mouse," diminutive of mus "mouse." So called because the shape and movement of some muscles (notably biceps) were thought to resemble mice. The analogy was made in Greek, too, where mys is both "mouse" and "muscle,"

from one of my LING/ANTH professors, found during a game of Dictionary, probably Johnson's:

munchpresent: a servant whom you send somewhere with a gift of food but who eats half of it on the way.

formed by analogy to French exocentric V+N->N compounds (like pickpocket), probably invented consciously and might just have been made up by Johnson himself.

my favorite French word is brouille. it means scrambled, as in scrambled eggs.