Wondrous Words Wednesday
Wondrous Words Wednesday is hosted by Bermudaonion’s Weblog. Kathy says: “Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading.”
My word this week is from Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear. Billy Beale is describing his experience in World War I:
“Mind you, they didn’t get me coming out of a trench and over the top. No, it was all that business at Messines, not knowing whether the other lot were in the trench next door, or below us, and not knowin’ whether the buggers — pardon my language, Miss — but not knowin’ where they’d laid mines. Us sappers ‘ad our work cut out for us there.”
According to the New Oxford American Dictionary on my Kindle app, a sapper is “a military engineer who lays or detects and disarms mines.”
I wonder if the word ‘sap’ is related? One would have to be a bit of a sap to be a sapper in wartime London. 🙂
It is, but it’s the verb form — to sap the energy from something.
Wow, being a sapper must require nerves of steel. If I’d heard sapper, I would have thought of something like a thug. I think I’ll be able to remember this one.
I’ve come across the word before, but never looked it up 🙁
Thanks for sharing!
I came across this recently, in a news report about Afghanistan I think. Sad that it needs to exist.
From reading military stuff, I learned that a sap is also a military trench or tunnel, and to sap was to dig one, the job of a sapper before explosives I guess.
A sap is also a small weighted club, leather with a lead weight, or a sock with a potato in it. And, I could sap you with it, but I promise I won’t.
Sap is also the wet stuff inside a tree, but I’d be a sap if I thought you didn’t know that already.