List of Shibboleths - Shibboleths in Fiction

Shibboleths in Fiction

• In his essay To Tell a Chemist (1965), Isaac Asimov claimed that one could distinguish a chemist from a non-chemist by asking a person to read the word "unionized" aloud. With no context given, he said that a chemist will pronounce it "un-ionized", but a non-chemist will pronounce it "union-ized".
• In Isaac Asimov's short story "No Refuge Could Save", a suspected German spy exposes himself by finishing a line from the third verse of The Star-Spangled Banner. (Under the assumption that most Americans know only the first verse.)
• In his essay "The Shibboleth of Fëanor", J. R. R. Tolkien describes how the Noldorin Elves intentionally change the sound /θ/ to /s/ in the Quenya language. The king's son Fëanor considered this change to be an insult to his dead mother Þerindë whose name he likewise would have had to pronounce Serindë.
• The U.S. TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent also features an episode titled "Shibboleth". In the episode, a serial rapist/murderer is identified largely because of his uncharacteristic enunciation of the /t/ sound in certain words. Specifically, his speech does not exhibit flapping; that is pronouncing the /t/ as an alveolar tap, between vowels in unstressed syllables (e.g., pronouncing the word "pretty," usually pronounced in American English).
• The U.S. TV series The West Wing, in the episode "Shibboleth", Christian Chinese nationals have smuggled themselves to the United States in a shipping container purportedly to escape religious persecution. President Bartlet decides to interview one of them to determine the sincerity of their beliefs. The immigrant's knowledge of the biblical story of the shibboleth convinces Bartlet.
• In the TV series The Wire, in the fourth season episode "Corner Boys", Felicia "Snoop" Pearson is seen discussing "Baltimore questions" with fellow gangster Chris Partlow in order to find rival drug dealers, freshly arrived from New York City, to kill. The idea is that anybody who grew up in Baltimore would know certain things about local popular culture that a recent arrival would most likely not know.
• Baltimore is also the subject of a shibboleth in an early episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, in which a suspect launches into a monologue involving whether locals are more likely to pronounce the name "Bawlmer" or "Bal-ti-moh".
• A TV commercial run by Tim Hortons features a family passing through Canadian customs coming from the United States. Without a passport, the Canadian driver says "rrrroll up the rrrrrrim to win" (a popular annual promotion run by the restaurant chain), properly rolling the "r". Another family, presumably not Canadian, fails to reproduce the phrase.
• A TV advertisement for KiwiBank features an Australian banker attempting to pronounce the New Zealand town name Whakatane as "Wack-a-tain". (It is actually pronounced /fɒkəˈtɑːni/ or /hwɒkəˈtɑːni/.)
• In the film Inglourious Basterds, Lt. Archie Hicox, a British soldier meeting with an informant in Nazi-occupied France betrays his identity to an SS Officer when he orders three drinks by holding up his middle three fingers, whereas Germans traditionally hold up the thumb, index, and middle fingers.
• In the film Red Dawn, during the Soviet invasion of the United States, the Wolverines (an organized American resistance group fighting the Soviet occupiers) encounter Col. Andy Tanner, a downed American pilot. Erica, one of the Wolverines, suspects Tanner is a Russian, and asks him to name the capital of Texas to prove he is American. Tanner correctly identifies Austin as the capital, but Erica believes the capital to be Houston and is about to shoot him when the other Wolverines intervene.
• Different forms of finger counting are used as a shibboleth in the novel Pi in the Sky, by John D. Barrow (between China and Japan).
• In Dara Horn's novel All Other Nights, a Jewish woman is talking with several male soldiers, and hopes to date one, but is only willing to date another Jew. So, she asks all the soldiers to solve the riddle "what is the opposite of meat?". After getting answers ranging from "non-meat", to feed, the lone Jew correctly answers "milk". Under kashrut laws, meat and dairy products cannot be mixed, and as such a Jew (and only a Jew) would consider them opposites.
• In Donald Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown, a man claiming to be a sailor betrays his identity by reporting the speed of a vessel in knots per hour. Knots is already a measure of speed, not distance; therefore, knots per hour is a measure of acceleration, defined as nautical miles per hour squared.