WORD OF THE WEEK

Shibboleth – noun – a belief, custom, or principle distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.

This fascinating Hebrew word literally stands for “ear of grain” or “torrent/flood”. The word’s defining point however was how it was pronounced as either shibboleth or sibboleth, helping the Gileadites to distinguish between different Hebrew tribes due to the fact that Ephraimites didn’t have the “sh” sound in their dialect. The most harmless examples of the definition are how people from different parts of the US say “pop” instead of “soda” or the way locals pronounce places like Colorado or New Orleans. The absolutely memeable gabagool, Italian-American slang for capicola, famously popularized by The Sopranos is another relatively benign example of a shibboleth.

But shibboleth is not quite so harmless otherwise. More often than not, the word is meant to define a negative divide between cultures/groups of people as exemplified in Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth installation at the Tate Modern Museum in London pictured at the top of the post. The enormous crack in the Turbine Hall floor is meant to represent this cultural divide between immigrants and the places they go to escape oppression and violence, how they are singled out as other in these new and foreign and supposedly safer spaces.

Another example shown brilliantly through Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, is the simple “3 beers” that gives away Lt. Archie Hicox to Major Hellstrom, signifying him as other, not a true German nationalist as he claims, but a brit who does not realize Germans use the thumb first when counting.

Another example of shibboleth, somehow even more frightening, is Jesse Plemons’s disturbing take on a militiaman interrogating his captives over where they were born while paying close attention to each of their accents in order to decide whether they deserve to be executed in Alex Garland’s Civil War. He seeks out their otherness to such extremes that he even wears red sunglasses meant to enhance contrast, making differences in skin tone stand out more definitively.