The word shibboleth is derived from a Hebraic word meaning ‘ear of corn’ (or the part of a plant that has the grains). An episode in the biblical book of Judges tells of how the people of Gilead used the word to identify Ephraimite refugees when their own tribe had declared war on the Ephraimites. Not having the ‘sh’ sound in their language, the refugees mispronounced the word and were killed.
At various points in history, different words have been used to tell whether a suspicious person belonged to one’s group or not. The Frisian people from the northern part of the Netherlands speak a different dialect from most of the rest of the country. During a rebellion, they used this to great effect, asking strangers who sailed into the area to pronounce the words for bread, butter and green cheese. The particular pronunciation of these words is quite similar to the English pronunciation, and completely different from the Dutch.
A number of shibboleths are based on the perceived inability of people from various parts of the world to pronounce particular words. During World War Two American soldiers used the word ‘lollapalooza’ as a shibboleth because they assumed that their enemies, the Japanese, would find it difficult to pronounce the letter ‘L’. Speakers of Arabic are considered to be less likely to pronounce the letter ‘P’, and so during the Israeli war of Independence passwords were chosen accordingly.
Not all shibboleths are used to distinguish between racial and linguistic groups. Isaac Asimov once suggested that one could tell a chemist from a non-chemist instantly by showing them the word ‘unionised’ in written form. A non-chemist would naturally pronounce it union-ised, whereas a chemist would read it as un-ionised.
Differences between British and American English might also be considered shibboleths. There’s the way the two languages pronounce the word
‘tomato’ (see the famous ‘you say tomahto, I say tomayto’ song), the way they pronounce the letter ‘Z’ (‘zee’or ‘zed’) and the odd set of circumstances that led to the metal that is on one side of the Atlantic known as ‘aluminium’ being called ‘aluminum’ on the other. Then again, these are all far too widespread to be particularly interesting.
Shibboleths can reveal whether you belong to a particular place, a social group or not, or anything else. They need not all be words either — tourists in a city frequently mark themselves out to be outsiders by means of their
actions. One of the more entertaining examples of this in recent popular culture occurs in last year’s Quentin Tarantino-directed film Inglourious Basterds (sic), where a British character betrays himself to the Nazis by holding up three fingers to ask for three beers. His mistake is that he holds up his
index, middle and ring fingers, whereas a true German would hold up the middle finger, index finger and thumb instead.
Yet the term originates in the pronunciation of a word; and words are the most interesting form of shibboleth there is n
— bluelullaby@gmail.com