What do you call someone who uses a 1999 IMac computer and an AOL email account?

Me! My daughter calls me a Luddite.

Whence "Luddite"?

Legend has it that Ned Ludd, an eccentric apprentice to a woolens-maker in the English city of Leicester, was tending a knitting machine one day in 1779 when his foreman reprimanded him for knitting too loosely.

"Square your needles!" the boss demanded, which today would be like saying, "I found three errors on the Cavendish contract!"

Enraged at this rebuke, Ned reportedly picked up a hammer and smashed his knitting mechanism to smithereens. The story of Ned's outburst spread across England almost as far as the smithereens themselves.

Two decades later, British textile workers in Nottingham, whose livelihood had been imperiled by mechanized looms, began smashing the newfangled machines in protest. Summoning the spirit of Ned, they called themselves "Luddites."

Masters of spin (in more ways than one), they even invented a mythical leader — "Captain Ludd" — who was said to command unseen armies that lurked around cities and threatened to attack factories.

The Luddites eventually faded away, but we still call anyone who resists new technologies a "Luddite."

Another term for throwing a monkey wrench into the works is "sabotage." Like "Luddite," it has a somewhat, well, fabricated origin.

The popular story goes something like this ... During the 1800s, striking French workers would throw their "sabots" (wooden shoes) into machines to — quite literally — clog up the works. So any action taken surreptitiously to disrupt or hamper something came to be called "sabotage."

It's a wonderful story that has just one, tiny flaw: it isn't true. "Sabotage" does derive from "sabot," but it clomped into English on an entirely different road. (As the voice on the GPS says, "Recalculating!)

In fact, the noun "sabot" gave rise to the French verb "saboter," which means to "clatter around noisily in wooden shoes." This sense of stumbling around gave rise to a more general meaning of "to work clumsily, to mess things up, sometimes as a way of protesting working conditions."

Eventually "saboter" came to denote more violent actions, such as blowing up bridges or removing the distributors from Nazi jeeps, as the nuns did in "The Sound of Music."

"Saboter" entered English as "sabotage," about 1900. Ned Ludd would have been proud.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.