Parliament and procedure

The sixteenth entry is l’ostruzionismo, and the English word for the same tactic has the strangest history of anything on this page. Ostruzionismo rests on Latin obstruere, to build in the way, and it describes exactly what happens: a wall of talk across the road to the vote. « Filibuster » describes nothing of the kind, because it began at sea. Dutch vrijbuiter was a man who took plunder on his own account; English borrowed it early and plainly as « freebooter », while the same word travelled south into French as flibustier and into Spanish as filibustero, the name given to the raiders of the Caribbean. In the middle of the nineteenth century American English borrowed that Spanish form back, first for private adventurers who fitted out their own expeditions against small republics, then for a senator who seized the floor and refused to yield it. So « freebooter » and « filibuster » are one word twice over, once overland and once by way of the sea. Italian kept the builder’s image; English kept the raider’s.