The World In Protest, Revolution or Civil War? Part Ten

This was first published in early 2012.

The Polarization of the Spanish Civil War" Part 5

With a rightist government now in control, landowners and many business owners, in general, often cut wages for workers and refused to hire union workers. The army was used to help harvest crops, so that landowners did not have to rely upon union workers. Some union workers were beaten and thousands became destitute because of unemployment.* With a pro-business government in power, owners began to ignore labor laws (wages were withheld by some owners, for instance) and the government was generally unresponsive to calls for enforcement.

When the unions announced their intention to strike to protest withheld wages and the generally poor working conditions and treatment of workers, the rightist government outlawed strikes (they called them "revolutionary"), closed the union newspaper, and had many union leaders arrested in an attempt to preempt the strike. While the strike went forward in many locations, it soon faltered without the arrested leaders. This only encouraged the rightist government to crack down even more, and the far right political organization was admitted into the government. This prompted some uprisings in certain areas, mainly in the industrialized and mining region of the north, and the government sent in troops to crush the rebellion in October 1934.

* Spain was heavily agricultural, more so the further south one went. One of the problems for agricultural workers was, it was seasonal work. A person had to make enough money to live on planting, caring for, and then harvesting crops, until the process was started again in the planting time of year. Poor wages and less demand for products because of the Great Depression left many workers desperate. Refusal to hire union workers left many of these workers near starvation.

WORD HISTORY:
Shirt/Skirt-While English uses both words, closely related to "short," they are really the same word going back in time, with "shirt" using the softer "sh" pronunciation and "skirt" the harder sounding "sk." They trace back to Indo European "sker," which meant "cut." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "s(h)kurtijon," with the meaning "a cut off, or shortened, garment." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "scyrte," with the same meaning. Later it became "shirte," before the modern version. In modern times, it is pretty much used exclusively for a man's upper body garment, but in the past, it was not uncommon for it to be used in similar context for a woman's garment, with "blouse" now more commonly used. Skirt has the same history, except it was borrowed into English from Old Norse (a North Germanic language; English is West Germanic), which had "skyrta," in the late 1200s, which also meant "shirt." The change in meaning from "garment worn around the upper body" to "woman's garment worn from the waist, a shortened form of lady's dress," is not completely known, but similar meaning change took place in other West Germanic dialects, where in most cases, forms of the word (shirt/skirt) mean "apron." Perhaps the general meaning of "cut off garment" was what really prevailed in the specific meaning change. A verb form, "skirt," meaning "around the border or edge," came from the noun in the 1600s. The notion is perhaps from the garment "wrapping around (bordering) parts of the body;" thus, "don't skirt the issue" (don't just go around the main issue) and "outskirts of the city" (area encircling the city), or again, "cutting off an issue, or cutting off going directly into a city," might have been the reason for the terms. Forms of "shirt/skirt" are quite common in the other Germanic languages: German has both "Schürze" and "Schurz" (“apron"), Low German Saxon has "Schört" ("apron"), Dutch has "schort" ("apron"), Swedish has "skjorta" ("shirt"), Danish and Norwegian have "skjorte" ("shirt"), Icelandic has "skyrta" ("shirt"). I could not find a form in modern Frisian, but Frisian once had "skerte/skorte."