Grammar (Part 2)

It's been pointed out to me that at least one of the words in yesterday's post could be termed a shibboleth. Which I though was some sort of apocalyptic term, but ends up being a linguistic one. However, its origins are somewhat end-of-days, and interesting to boot, and so I shall share them with you...now.

As you might have guessed, the word 'shibboleth' comes from a Hebrew word, 'shibbólet', referring to either (depending on context) a stream or torrent, or the part of a plant where the grain is located. Original definitions, however, become irrelevant, as the word takes on a whole new meaning in the Book of Judges. In chapter 12, or around 1300BC, the tribe of Gilead conquers the Ephraimites, and as the surviving losers of the battle attempt to flee back across the Jordan, a linguistic difference proves to be their ultimate downfall. The Gileadites, securing the river's fords and points of crossing, ask all travellers to say 'shibboleth', and if they mispronounce the starting phoneme, saying /s/ rather than /sh/, they are put to death on the spot.

Today, the word has come to contain a broader meaning: any telling in-crowd phrase, any cultural touchstone, any marker of class or creed, for intellectual or more visceral discriminatory use, is a modern-day shibboleth.

For instance, I believe the word used in my earlier post that might be considered a shibboleth was ain't. More historically, Wikipedia tells me that, during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, American soldiers quizzed others on knowledge of baseball, a sport German infiltrators would allegedly knew nothing about. And I most recently came across mention of a shibboleth when trying to determine how to phrase a letter I was composing - was it in regard to or in regards to? Apparently you are to only give one regard...a Mr K G Wilson writes that, "[w]ith regards to is Nonstandard and frequently functions as a shibboleth, although it can be Standard and idiomatic in complimentary closes to letters: With [my] regards to your family…. In regards to, however, is both Substandard and Vulgar, although it appears unfortunately often in the spoken language of some people who otherwise use Standard. It never appears in Edited English."

Yikes. The power of words. So there you go!