Filibuster: how the meaning changed from piracy to politics
- Filibuster, freebooter, flyboat all have the same Dutch ancestor: vrijbuiter, meaning ‘privateer’
A filibuster was once a pirate. The word ultimately comes from the Dutch vrijbuiter – meaning “privateer, pirate, robber” – formed from vrijbuit (“prize, spoils, plunder”), composed of vrij (“free”) and buit (“booty”).
Vrijbuiter entered English via two routes, giving two different words.
In one, the Dutch word was borrowed in the late 16th century to give the English freebooter, referring in an era of maritime trade routes to a privateer, and later more generally to a pirate or any person in search of plunder.
The spread of the word’s other form – to other languages, too – has been attributed to one of the most important sourcebooks of 17th century piracy, first published in Dutch in 1678 as De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, then translated into German, Spanish and English, as History of the Buccaneers of America.
In its 1686 French translation, the first record of the term flibustier is found.
An earlier French form was fribustier – documented in a 1667 account of the French Antilles – said to have been influenced by the English “freebooter”. The subsequent change of fri- to fli- is hypothesised to have been influenced by the Dutch vlieboot (“fly-boat”) – this originally denoted one of the small boats used on the Vlie, or channel leading out of the Zuyder Zee, later to a small, fast-sailing vessel used in the 16th and 17th centuries, which became the French flibot, the Spanish flibote, the German flieboot.
It was the later French form flibustier that was adopted and used in English in the late 18th century, specifically for those 17th century adventurers who pillaged the Spanish colonies in the West Indies.
In the mid-19th century, the form filibuster – derived from the Spanish filibustero – started to be used in reference to adventurers who, from 1850 to 1869, organised unsanctioned expeditions from the United States to revolutionise certain territories in Central America and the Spanish West Indies. More generally, a filibuster engaged in unauthorised, irregular warfare against foreign states.
Around the same time, filibuster began to be used in the US, as a verb and a noun, to refer to a person or an act obstructing progress in a legislative assembly, usually by prolonged speaking. Its most common meaning today, filibustering is used the world over, in the US Senate and the British House of Commons, as well as in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council – giving rise to the Hong Kong Cantonese term lāai bou “pull cloth”.
The journey from piracy to politics is not too much of a stretch.