The image of workers hurling their wooden clogs, 'sabots', into the gears is appealing, but no document from the time backs it up. By the 19th century, the French verb 'saboter' already meant to botch a job, to work clumsily. In 1897, at the CGT union congress in Toulouse, Émile Pouget and Paul Delesalle turned 'sabotage' into a weapon, summed up as: bad pay, bad work.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.