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Among the many complicated intertribal conflicts recorded in the Book of Judges is one involving an interesting word test at the Jordan River. In an effort to distinguish between friend and foe, the guys who controlled the crossing at the time (the Gileadites) would ask anyone wanting to cross the river to say the word shibboleth. If you wanted to go across, and you didn’t pronounce shibboleth the way the Gileadites pronounced it, they’d know you were not one of their crowd, and bingo, off with your head.
The word shibboleth has come down to us today unchanged, and means “a word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another.”
Whether or not we admit it, we sort people into classes on the basis of their speech. When we hear someone say “She’s went to the store” or “I ain’t got no pencil,” we mentally place the speaker in a certain class or social level, on the basis of that atrocious grammar.
That kind of class marker is a fairly obvious one. But sometimes the shibboleths we use to classify people, while deep-seated, are far more trivial.
Over the years I’ve accumulated a whole slew of shibboleths I use to classify you.
“NOOK-yuh-lur” is high on that list. Yes, this mispronunciation should not be a death-penalty offense; after all, the meaning of the word nuclear is still communicated. But in the minds of those of us who care about acceptable language, it instantly marks the speaker as “not one of us.”
Likewise, when you use enormity to mean large size—and even though that usage is slowly becoming acceptable, and even though President Obama uses it that way repeatedly—it tells me that you’re not one of us.
When you pronounce quasi “KWAHZ-ee” instead of “KWAY-ZYE,” it tells me that you’re not one of us.
When you use tenant when you mean tenet, or tact when you mean tack, it tells me that you’re not one of us. Sorry.
However, the bad thing about shibboleths is that we’re often so busy classifying people _base_d on their pronunciations, and quibbling over their word choices, that we fail to hear what they’re saying. We stand poised to leap with a triumphant “ah-HAH!” on some supposed error, primarily so that we can feel superior.
A commenter on a language blog entry about the common misuse of the word enormity declared that the word “is my one-word usage test.”
To which John McIntyre, chief of the copy desk at the Baltimore Sun, responded:
“There, in a single sentence, you can see encapsulated what people dislike about purists and the mavenry. Someone is listening to you, not paying attention to the substance of what you say, but waiting for you to make a mistake. And it might not even be a mistake; it could be some arbitrary and idiosyncratic ‘rule’ of which you are unaware, and about which there is dispute among the professionals. The purist is impatiently waiting to give a thumbs-up-thumbs-down judgment, and he is a hanging judge in a court from which there is no appeal. Precision in the use of language is important. [But] so is a sense of proportion.”
Have I been sufficiently chastened by McIntyre’s scolding that I’ll abandon my silly shibboleths and not pounce and gibber and point when I hear someone get something “wrong”? Don’t count on it. I was born an annoying twit, and I’ll die an annoying twit.
What are your shibboleths? And don’t stand there and tell me you don’t have any.
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