Annie: You've got it correct in the post you made and the citation by Michael Quinion.

B-stone: I don't think it has any connection to naive or being unskilled, though that is a plausible explanation which does have some degree of tie-in with the actual use of unskilled laborers to build the railroad.

I don't believe navvy has ever been used as a derivative to describe those of Scandinavian ancestry.

quote:Originally posted by Auburn Annie:
Found this on the internet:

From Larry Preuss: “I have wondered about the origin of the word navvy. My Shorter OED tells me it is an abbreviation of navigator but somehow that doesn’t seem likely. Are there other thoughts on this?”

It’s true enough, though we’ve lost the associations that made it seem an obvious enough coinage to people at the time. From about 1660 onwards in Britain, many artificial waterways were built to make rivers navigable by ships and boats. These became known as navigations, a term first recorded early in the eighteenth century. The word was later applied to the cross-country canals linking river to river that were one of the engineering triumphs of the second half of that century and the early part of the next. The labourers who built these navigations—entirely by hand using pick, shovel and barrow—came to be called navigators, an obvious enough association of ideas. The term was transferred to their successors, the often unruly gangs of itinerant workmen who built the railways across Britain from the 1830s onwards. It’s only then that the abbreviated form began to appear in print, and it’s attached in particular to these men and to the era of railway building in Britain. Later in the century it become the usual term for any labourer working on construction projects. It was so firmly attached to the idea of excavation that when the first mechanical digger came into service in the 1870s it was called a steam navvy.


Here are the lyrics of an old 'Folk' song from the Brish Isles, I think, It is titled Navigator and lends credence to the above.

The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts
They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts
They never drank water but whiskey by pints
And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights

Navigator, Navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight

They died in their hundreds, with no sign to mark where
Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur
By landslide and rockblast they got buried so deep
That in death if not life they'll have peace while they sleep

Navigator, Navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight

Their mark on this land is still seen and still laid
The way for a commerce where vast fortunes were made
The supply of an Empire where the sun never set
Which is now deep in darkness but the railway's there yet

Navigator, Navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight. END.

It is a good song. goes down well in the pub.

quote:Originally posted by joveski:
if some of these are movie clips, someone should make a VCD out of them http://www.corfid.com/ubb/smile.gif

I gotta scrore me one of those VCD's.

very cool this is, lots of good footage on gord, but i will probably have to buy the media recorder because it buffers constantly, i got 1.22 mins of the black day in july interview though through the free 2 mins of media recorder

Char, thought I'd bring this thread to the forefront for those new to this site...good stuff.