Filibuster

We hear the term filibuster used from time to time in news items related to politicians trying to block their opponents from passing legislation with which they don’t agree.
 
I was surprised to learn that until relatively recently the word filibuster referred to a pirate or a freebooter. Filibustering was plundering and stealing.
 
Where does this word come from? In brief, the word filibuster is related to the word freebooter which has its origins in Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic words being ‘to love booty’! The word freebooter came to English in the 1560s from Dutch vrijbuiter (plunderer, robber).
 
Dutch vrijbuiter is the source of Spanish flibustero and French flibustier. From these sources, the English word flibutor (pirate; later, a West Indian buccaneer of the 17th century) appears in the 1580s. A flibutor was another name for a pirate (a word which came to English around 1300) or buccaneer (a word which came to English in the 1680s).  
 
By 1851, the word filibuster appears in American English in reference to lawless military adventurers from the US who tried to overthrow Central American governments (e.g., expeditions against Cuba (1850 – 51), the Mexican state of Sonora (1853 – 54), and Nicaragua (1855 – 58). At that time, filibustering was defined as “the right and practice of private war, or the claim of individuals to engage in foreign hostilities aside from, and even in opposition to the government with which they are in political membership” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, January 1853” (Online Etymological Dictionary).
 
Filibustering, now used in US politics to refer to obstructionist legislators who ‘pirate’ a debate or overthrow the usual order of authority, is from the 1860s.
 
Could we say that today political filibustering is stealing time? Or perhaps, when a sports team ‘runs out the clock’ at the end of a game so that their opponent does not get a last chance to score, are they filibustering?!
 
Reference: Online Etymological Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
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