In the fantasies which make up most of the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, James Joyce dramatizes the hidden guilts and the defenses against guilt of his characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.  Among other things Bloom feels guilty about having exchanged (slightly) dirty letters with a woman named Martha, and in one hallucination she suddenly looms up to accuse him of breach of promise.  Thereupon Bloom first confides to the police, also present in this fantasy scene, that she is drunk, then murmurs the mysterious word “Shitbroleeth.”  This is a mangling—in “Circe” Bloom is very tired, and his knowledge of Judaism is sketchy—of the famous word “Shibboleth” in Judges 12:5-6. 

According to the Old Testament story, Jephthah and the Gileadites defeated the Ephraimites in battle, and when the surviving Ephraimites attempted to get away, they were given a test, namely, commanded to say the word “shibboleth.”  In their dialect of Hebrew the Ephraimites could not manage this pronunciation, said “sibboleth” instead, and were killed on the spot.  As to what the word “shibboleth” meant, that might be “stream in flood,” which would be appropriate because the episode took place at the ford of the Jordan River.  In Ulysses it’s appropriate that Bloom, a Jew, should look back to the Old Testament for a test-word to certify his identity and somehow get him off the hook (moments earlier, he’s murmured Masonic passwords to the police, hoping that that would help).  It’s appropriate too that like the Ephraimites but with less dire results he mispronounces “shibboleth.”  Bloom makes verbal mistakes all through Ulysses, often in a comically endearing way. 

In current use “shibboleth” means chiefly “a moral formula held tenaciously and unreflectingly, esp. a prohibitive one; a taboo” (OED), but the original sense of “pronunciation test-word” is still available and ready for employment.  Indeed, a shibboleth-style test was employed no longer ago than World War II, when partisans in occupied Holland needed to find out whether people were Dutch or German-posing-as-Dutch.  They asked them to pronounce the name of the seaside town “Scheveningen.”  A German would instinctively say the name with a “sh” sound at the beginning, whereas a Dutchman would start it more gutturally.  Have a listen.  

By extension, a shibboleth-test might involve a choice of vocabulary.  Employing “napkin” instead of “serviette” would in some circles identify you as upper-class (see pudding).  Or the test might involve spelling.  In Ross Macdonald’s 1959 novel The Galton Case a character’s hidden Canadian origins are revealed when in a letter he inadvertently writes “your labours” instead of “your labors.”  But the original, test-via-pronunciation sense seems worth preserving.  After all, there might be practical uses for it.  I hope it never comes to warfare between Britain and the United States, but in case you need to find out whether people are Brits or Yanks, you might just ask them to say “zebra” aloud:  it has a short “e” in Britain, a long “e” in the US.  Or you could employ several shibboleths at once in the test sentence “Take Schedule Z down to the laboratory, would you?”  A Brit would begin “Schedule” with an “sh” sound, accent “labóratory” on the second syllable (and compress the last two syllables into one), and pronounce “Z” as “zed.”  For other shibboleths of this kind, see the Youtube tutorial page.

Meanwhile, if you see “shibboleth” in print and pronounce it “shitbroleeth,” what would that identify you as?  A Joycean.