trouble [ME] Our word trouble comes, by way of Old French truble, from Latin turbidus ‘disturbed, violent, turbid’ formed from turba ‘a crowd, disturbance’, source of turbid [LME], and related to disturb [ME], perturb [LME], and turbulent [LME]. From the start, in the 13th century, trouble meant ‘difficulty or problems’. ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward’ is from the biblical book of Job. Most people now think of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as beginning in the early 1970s, but the same term was applied to the unrest around the partition of Ireland in 1921, and in an 1880 glossary of words used in Antrim and Down the Troubles are defined as ‘the Irish rebellion of 1641’. The first troubleshooters had a very specific occupation. In the early years of the 20th century they mended faults on telegraph or telephone lines.