Thorstein Veblen
"Sabotage"
Editorial
"DIAL. A Fortnightly", (New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.)
Vol. LXVI (Dec., 28, 1918, to June, 28, 1919)
April 5, 1919, p. 363
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SABOTAGE is one of the late and formidable loan-words of the English 
language. At the same time it has also some currency in other languages, as 
would be expected in the case of a loan-word which fills so notable a place 
in common speech, since the facts which call for the use of such a new word 
are sure to range beyond the frontiers of any one language. In all this the 
word has the company of such other late comers as "camouflage" and 
"bolshevism." And not much different is the case of such late-come, home-bred 
terms as "graft" and "goodwill," and "intangible assets" and "vested 
interests." Whether they are borrowed from abroad or are made over from 
innocent home-grown words, all these half- technical terms that are making 
their way into common use to describe notable facts lack that sharp 
definition that belongs to words of the ancient line. There is always 
something of metaphor or analogy about them, and the meaning attached to 
their use in common speech is neither precise nor uniform. They are still 
more or less unfamiliar; they seem uncouth and alien, but they make good 
their intrusion into the language by becoming indispensable. They are needed 
for present use to describe facts which are very much in evidence and which 
are not otherwise provided for.

Of course, the facts described by such late word-growths as "graft," 
"sabotage," "camouflage," or "bolshevism" are not altogether new, nor nearly 
so; but they count for more now than they have done in the past, and so it 
has become necessary to find words for them. As a fact of history, graft is 
at least as old as the early Egyptian dynasties, and sabotage is quite 
inseparable from the price system, so that its beginnings can scarcely fail 
to be as ancient as the love of money. It is perhaps the first-born of those 
evils that have been said to be rooted in the love of money. Doubtless graft 
and sabotage have been running along together through human history from its 
beginning. We should all find it very difficult to get our bearings in any 
period of history or any state of society which might by any chance not be 
shot through with both. Still those ancients who passed before the last 
quarter of the nineteenth century had not the use of these technical terms to 
describe the facts, with which they seem all the while to have been familiar 
enough. It may have been because the facts of graft and sabotage, however 
massive and wide-reaching they doubtless were in those past times, did not, 
after all, then stand out in such bold relief on the face of things. But 
things have moved forward since then. And quite plainly now, since the price 
system and all its ways, means, and ends have reached that mature development 
which is familiar to this generation, both of these terms have become 
indispensable in common and current speech.
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