navvy

[prettygoodword]

navvy (NAV-ee) - (chiefly UK) n., a laborer, esp. one employed in construction or excavation projects.


This is a clipping (dating to the 1820s) of navigator, in the now obsolete meaning of someone who labored building navigating canals, now known as just canals. When railroads started being built, the name for diggers carried over, and the meaning expanded further to any type of (so-called unskilled) construction labor. Fun fact: when the steam-powered excavator was introduced in the 1870s, it was sometimes called a steam navvy.


Admin note: Posting might get spotty over the next week or so due to external obligations.

---L.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

Huh. Thank you once again; I’d first encountered the word in George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were The Joys” (first published posthumously inPartisan Review, September-October 1952), and supposed it to be of East Indian origin with racist and classist baggage.

(Some classmates at his snooty boarding school were interrogating a new scholarship-boy:

I have seen a little new boy, hardly older than eight, desperately lying his way through such a catechism:
‘Have your people got a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘What sort of car?’
‘Daimler.’
‘How many horse-power?’
(Pause, and leap in the dark.) ‘Fifteen.’
‘What kind of lights?’
The little boy is bewildered.
‘What kind of lights? Electric or acetylene?’
(A longer pause, and another leap in the dark.) ‘Acetylene.’
‘Coo! He says his pater's car's got acetylene lamps. They went out years ago. It must be as old as the hill.’
‘Rot! He's making it up. He hasn't got a car. He's just a navvy. Your pater's a navvy.’)

[dewline]

The place where I encountered "navvy" was Gordon Lightfoot's song, "The Canadian Railroad Trilogy"...

"We are the navvies who work upon the railway
Swingin' our hammers in the bright blazin' sun
Livin' on stew and drinkin' bad whiskey
Bendin' our backs 'til the long days are done..."