Recently, on a quiet evening, my wife and I were leafing through some intellectual writings. At least, my wife Ellie was.
While reading a piquant review of the film Gone Girl in The New York Review of Books, she came across the word “shibboleth.” Since asking me for definitions can be easier than using the Internet (though sometimes more painful), I proceeded to impress her by paraphrasing the narrative in Judges 12:1–6: In the aftermath of battle, the Ephraimite enemy was exposed by his inability to pronounce the word “shibboleth,” intoning instead “sibboleth.”
Alas, my wife patiently pointed out that this definition of “shibboleth” did not fit into the context created by the NYRB reviewer. “How the mighty had fallen!” I thought. I had pierced the seemingly invincible armor of lexical inerrancy on the part of a NYRB correspondent.
Allow me to observe that I was at least half-right. The Biblical usage of “shibboleth,” inherited from Judges 12, is still part of our language, but for the most part it has been eclipsed by newer meanings.
Traditionalist that I am, let me begin with some examples that retain the Biblical signification. We are informed (in The Forward) that “during World War II … the Dutch, who have an s in their phonology but not a sh, identified Germans, who have an initial sh (spelled sch) but not an initial s … The most common Dutch shibboleth was the name of the city Scheveningen, in which the ch is pronounced like the ch in Bach and whoever couldn’t say it properly could be in as much trouble as an Ephraimite at the fords of the Jordan.”
Ireland’s Sunday Independent reminds us of some other shibboleths of the verbal sort: “Gershwin had fun with the different ways people say ‘tomato.’ Listen to the way Americans say ‘marry merry Mary’ and compare it to any Irish person. Aussies and Kiwis [people from New Zealand, not the fruit!] sometimes use ‘fish and chips’ to tell who’s who: The Kiwi pronunciation is ‘fush and chups.’”
These examples have, implicit within them, some value judgment: Our pronunciation is correct, higher class, etc., than that of others.
This is not absent from Biblical studies. As reported in The New York Times: On TV’s Weakest Link, a contestant responds to the host’s challenge with the reply, “Revelations”: “Instead, the final book of the New Testament is titled ‘Revelation,’ without an ‘s.’ This error has appeared frequently in print … Bible experts consider that kind of mistake a shibboleth.”
Yet to resolve the dilemma of the NYRB “shibboleth,” we must turn to a second meaning of the word, well explicated in a story from Ireland’s SundayTribune: “In modern usage, a shibboleth is a truism which bundling together a dense packet of emotions and historical arguments like DNA in a gene, is so patently true that it requires explanation only to … outsiders. And the surest way for an outsider to offend is to force insiders to defend or even explain the reasoning behind a shibboleth.” With this in mind, we can be pretty sure that the NYRB reviewer did not go gaga over GoneGirl.
This modern usage of shibboleth is seen in the world of politics, as is (or was) the case with former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and a reporter who covered him (for The Globe and Mail): “Now, while it may be desirable for politicians to forsake shibboleths, it is not something that is easy for them to do. The shibboleth to the politician is as the coat of many colors to Joseph. Take it off, and he will not be the same.” As good as this is, “we” know that today no self-respecting Bible scholar thinks that the distinctive feature in Joseph’s coat was its “many colors.”
For a happy conclusion, let us turn to an article from the Sydney Morning Herald: “Examples of shibboleths passed down to us from the 20th century include that … ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was written to promote drug-taking … Today I want to tackle the most annoying shibboleth in popular culture—that the song ‘MacArthur Park’ is a model of pretentious incomprehensibility.” I don’t know about you, but I am not feeling the least bit bad to inhabit a world where the proper exegesis of a song is the most annoying shibboleth we can identify!
Recently, on a quiet evening, my wife and I were leafing through some intellectual writings. At least, my wife Ellie was.
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