Word of the Day

[glennagirl.livejournal.com]

MONDAY, JANUARY 20

Sabot

[sab-OH]Part of speech: noun

Origin: french, 16th century

• A blocky wooden shoe
• In weaponry, a disk that positions the projectile in the rifle barrel or cannon

Examples of Sabot in a sentence

• A European peasant woman might have worn a handmade kerchief and clunky sabots on her feet.
• The cannon replica was missing an important piece for positioning and firing, the sabot.

About Sabot

If shown a picture of a sabot, you might call it a clog. This clunky shoe, made out of a single block of wood, was the footwear of choice among 16th century European peasants. Then the military stole the word to describe a wooden piece of equipment used for stabilizing weapons that resembles the shoe.

Did you Know?

"Sabot" comes directly from the same word in French, meaning wooden shoe. But did you know there's a tie to the Italian word “ciabatta”? You’ll know this as a type of bread, but it was so named because of its resemblance to the wooden shoe.

Comments

[pfrye.livejournal.com]

Illya Kuryakin smiled as he listened to the clacking sound the old women made as they walked down the street. He was in Holland with Napoleon. The old women in their sabots reminded him of his babushka trudging through the countryside wearing her lapti (a Russian peasant shoe woven from bark). He smiled as he remembered her telling him to hang his worn out lapti on the fence in front of their dacha to ward off evil.

Illya sighed, it wasn't often that something brought back his childhood so strongly.