I've long been fascinated by shibboleths, the words or phrases which identify people as belonging to a particular group or subculture. The word itself (which literally refers to "a part of a plant containing grain") gained that particular linguistic meaning from the inspiring Biblical tale of the Gileadites, who ferreted out their enemy, the Ephraimites, by demanding that anyone trying to cross the river Jordan say the word "shibboleth". As the Ephraimites' dialect didn't include the "sh" phoneme, anyone who pronounced it "sibboleth" was summarily slaughtered.

I was first introduced to the concept, though, in the novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, by Jimmy Breslin. Early in the novel, we're told that one of the main characters had a great fondness for a tale of a Sicilian shibboleth:

What Baccala wanted to do at first was not good. "Ciciri," he muttered one night. The three people with him at dinner became nervous. The word ciciri means bean, but to Baccala the meaning is much deeper. The only history he knows of is the rebellion of Sicilians in Palermo in 1282 against the French. A French soldier tried to rape a housewife in front of her husband in Palermo. The husband killed the soldier and all Palermo took to the streets. They surrounded French soldiers and told them to say the word ciciri. It is supposed to be an impossible set of syllables for the French tongue to handle. So the people of Palermo, with a great shout, slit the throats of the soldiers. Baccala, who knows the story by heart, loves to talk about the part where the hero of the uprising, Nicola Pancia, boarded a French ship in the harbor and had seventy French sergeants and their wives and children thrown overboard. Nicola Pancia and his men hung over the side and cheered each time a baby drowned.

"The baby makes-a bubbles in the water," Baccala always says, crying from laughter.

In more recent history, each time Baccala mutters this particular word, somebody in Brooklyn gets invited on a deep-sea fishing trip from Sheepshead Bay. Out in the ocean, a rope is put around the man's neck. The other end of the rope is attached to an old jukebox. The jukebox is thrown overboard. The man invariably follows.

(The word "shibboleth" always sounds to me like a name out of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. I suppose it doesn't help that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote an essay named The Shibboleth of Fëanor - which, again, sounds to me more like a mythical beast than a linguistic term.)

One of the things that fascinated me about Scientology was the overwhelming quantity of shibboleths it spawned. From words made up out of whole cloth, to common words repurposed to mean something entirely different within the context of the cult's vernacular, to Hubbard's randomly affected British pronunciation of certain words, it's exceptionally difficult for a "wog" to reproduce their bizarre speech well enough to fool an actual member of the cult. (Not impossible - but that's a story for another time.)

The analysis of Left Behind that I've been reading has revealed some of the shibboleths of the "premillenial dispensationalist" subculture, so that's been quite interesting to me as well. Some of this group's jargon was discussed (at least in the blogosphere) when Mike Huckabee was still in the Presidential race - like George W. Bush, he peppered his campaign speeches with "code words" intended to convey to the Religious Right that he was one of them, words and phrases which seemed merely strange (or even completely innocuous) to anyone outside the group.

Like most subcultures, the SCA has its shibboleths, too. When I was in college, a knight moved to a neighboring SCA group from the West Kingdom, and was eagerly fêted by the people there, as he was the only Peer in their group. But something about him bothered a few of us; he didn't sound right. He called some things by the wrong names, and was baffled by some of the common words of SCA parlance. That led us to dig deeper, and ask "innocent" questions which revealed that he "couldn't remember" the name of the Crown who had knighted him just three years previously - at the tender age of sixteen - nor the name of the group he'd played in out West, nor even the names of anyone back there who could vouch for him. (He was, not surprisingly, angry at being unmasked - yet, oddly, the people in his group who'd been deceived were furious with us for depriving them of their "knight".)

Years later, in Trimaris, another false Peer moved in... but he knew the shibboleths, and remained undetected for some time. (A situation disappointing for several reasons, only one of which was his duplicity... but that too is a story for another time.)