1. a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.
2. a slogan; catchword.
3. a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.
It means all that?! I needs (sic) some clarification. Do all of these apply or am I understanding it wrong:
You're reading it all too literally. You have to look at it's origins to understand what a shibboleth is, and just how strange a thing it is....:
"Shibboleth" was THE word used by the Gileadites as a test to detect the fleeing Ephraimites, who could not pronounce the sound "
sh." I.e. In order to rat-out a group of people they INVENTED A WORD - "shibboleth" - THOSE PEOPLE COULD NOT PRONOUNCE (because the word contained a pheonetic sound that culture could not pronounce....) So it has since become THE word for any sort of thing like that. (A particular hand signal, type of hat, ... anything that can be used by one group of people to distinguish themselves from another.) Hence a shibboleth can be ANYTHING any one group decides can be used to distinguish itself from another.
1. (this one is the hardest for me. how can "pronunciation" and "mode of dress" be used in the same definition?!) I can't think of any examples, except maybe odd clubs that have uniforms or something.
Because shibboleth has come to mean
any abstraction of itself! (Which is
SO COOL to me, from a linguistic perspective!)
2. Could it be "Dy-no-mite!" or the way we (or maybe just Americans) call all brands of facial tissue "Kleenex"? But then, that's a genericized trademark... IDK 'bout this one either.
If you can determine that whatever you pick can be used to distinguish one group from another, then yes, it is a form of shibboleth! E.g. You wrote (as an addition to other words with specific meaning ONLY TO NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS):
[...]
I still think you should make up a real sentence! Oooh! And try to use amusing hyphenations, such as:
hoity-toity (1 or 2)
wishy-washy
higgledy-piggledy (<-- Found this one when I got side-tracked looking up a word in the dictionary, which happens too often--I'm such a nerrrrrd!)
The prior words plus your additions formed - to me - a list that could be a shibboleth to determine native english-language speakers (albeit imperfectly, but hey - it's not too big a stretch!
)
Ditto your examples of american's using product-name slang for items: Kleenex, Popsicle, ...
3. Okay, I give up, I don't know ANY of these!
"Leet" (I refuse to use the symbols) seems like a really good example. Is it?
Help us out Mxy, I'm stumped!
No, you're not... you're exactly correct with your example! (Although some "non-leets" might still be able to decipher the "word" "1337...." Oh, and I have absolutely no problem using the replacement symbols as letters, since I'm all for the evolution and diversification of language.... I've made a few contributions of my own, BTW!)
What you've given ("Leet-speak") is a valid example of a shibboleth, since it distinguishes one group from all others. (One side-effect of most shibboleths: they're usually NOT 100% effective....)
So JANE: You're only confused because you haven't made the jump to the fact that the
abstraction of shibboleth, in addition to being a shibboleth, is now
THE word (or term) for all such sorts of things!
(You're obviously on the right track, but you just don't seem to be able to believe that that's what's going on here, I think!)
It IS kind of crazy - that the word is viewed as the original example of the general meaning of ITSELF - but that's why I added it to my list oddball words long ago!
[Also, it's a great example to show how pretty-much ALL language has evolved when you really think about it: Somewhere, at some time in the past, someone looked at something and said "that's an
orange" and hence everything with that color is now called "
orange!" I.e. The color "
orange" is an abstraction of the thing originally labelled "
orange...."]
Capiche? (
)