The word that divides us all

It’s a code, and we use it more than we think.

Three thousand or so years ago, two tribes went at each other in the land of Gilead, now part of modern Jordan. The Ephraimites had invaded Gilead by crossing the Jordan River, only to be defeated in battle. When the survivors tried to flee back across the river, the army of Gilead blocked the fords, intending no survivors. But the members of these two Hebrew tribes looked and dressed like one another. How could the Gileadites identify the enemy?

Their solution: Make each approaching person pronounce the word shibboleth. Here's how the King James Bible put it in Judges 12:5-6:

And it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Shibboleth is Hebrew for the part of a plant that contains the grain. Imagine telling a German to try and pronounce wheat ear.” Same thing.

Today a shibboleth counts as a word, custom, or manner of dress that distinguishes tribes from one another. But its original sense as a test word survived into modern times. A shibboleth enabled the 1937 Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic, when troops slaughtered Haitian immigrants who couldn’t pronounce the Spanish word for parsley, perejil. Americans used the password lollapalooza during World War II to catch Japanese spies who couldn’t pronounce that crazy “l.” Against the Germans they came up with thunder and welcome, assuming those krauts couldn’t handle the th or w. (No one seems to have used the literal shibboleth wheat ear.)

Accents make ideal shibboleths. “The best shibboleth I ever hit upon,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “lay in the pronunciation of the word ‘been’.” Brits and Canadians make it sound like a legume, Americans like a wastebasket. Similarly, we residents of New Hampshire can distinguish ourselves from tourists by the pronunciation of our towns: LEB-nin for Lebanon, MAH-drid for Madrid, BER-lin for Berlin. Flatlanders treat them like foreign cities, bless their ignorant hearts.

Accents aside, if you want to know people’s political identity, ask them to name Joe Biden’s political party. Is it the Democratic Party or the Foxnewsy Democrat Party?

A more nefarious kind of shibboleth infects our culture. Linguists call it a furtive shibboleth. It’s a kind of internal password, helping members of a tribe to identify one another.

Not all furtive shibboleths are evil. For years, closeted gays would clue themselves to each other as “a friend of Dorothy.” It comes from L. Frank Baum’s book The Road to Oz:

“You have some queer friends, Dorothy,” a character notes. Dorothy replies untribalistically, “The queerness doesn’t matter so long as they’re friends.”

(Personally, I’m a husband of Dorothy, which makes me a member of a small and uninteresting tribe.)

I colorized this image, which should spark shibbolethic rage among the Ozzie tribe.

You often see furtive shibboleths reported as dog whistles in the news media. “World banker” stands for Jewish businessperson, “urban” for Black, “state’s rights” for legal racism. Leftist academics use “privilege” as a verb, dog-whistling their identity.

Why care? Because tribalism is dangerously illiberal. It violates the Enlightenment principles that formed our modern, increasingly shaky civilization. Dictators and oligarchs thrive under tribalism. Billionaires go tax-free by focusing voters’ tribal rage on each other. Leftists zero in on “offensive” language, causing fed-up moderates to elect the unwoke. Our culture improves when we practice rhetorical decorum, using terms that cross the tribal River Jordans. It collapses when we get all furtive on each other.

The absolute worst of all furtive shibboleths is 88, code for “Heil Hitler.” (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, get it?) The commandant of Auschwitz changed the name of the street where he lived to 88, in honor of the Führer. Today the numeral inspires the American far right. We’re seeing the Hitler 88 more and more online—often combined with 14, which stands for the first 14 words in a white-supremacist manifesto:

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children…

The crazy right combines the two magic numbers to make 1488 (numerology is big with these people.) Jack “Pizzagate” Posobiec has used the 1488 shibboleth repeatedly. Not to imply that this former naval intelligence officer is a Nazi; I’ll let him do that himself.

Last I checked, Posobiec was an employee of the Republican National Committee.