Garbanzos and Gileadites

I used the word ersatz in a recent email, and checked to see if I'd covered it in this blog. I hadn't, so let's make up for that oversight and see where the word takes us.

I wondered if it was a Yiddish word that I'd missed in my posts on that subject, but etymonline.com says that it is a German word meaning literally compensation, replacement, or substitute. It was used in 1875 as an adjective to refer to military units held in reserve. It is now used as an adjective to describe anything artificial or substitute. It was then used as a noun starting in 1892, to mean any artificial substance or article used to replace something genuine. Like those pink, blue or yellow packets that are ersatz sugar.

As referenced in the opening paragraph, when researching a word it is interesting to see what other words have a connection to the word being researched, or how it compares with similar words. Ersatz provided neither. So let's go with another word and see where it takes us.

In a goodreads book review I used the word shibboleth, and again double checked against this blog. It turned out to be another word I had yet to expound upon with a very interesting and expansive etymology.

As I wrote the review I wanted shibboleth to mean the equivalent of "sacred cow" but found that it means far more. The third listed meaning is, indeed, close 'to sacred cow: a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth. In fact, "sacred cow" might itself be a shibboleth.

The second meaning of shibboleth is "a slogan or catchword." I can't recall having seen shibboleth used with this meaning. And the primary definition is "a peculiarity of pronunciation,behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons. So a shibboleth would be the Texas Rangers' (the lawmen, not the baseball team) cowboy hats, or the uniform of people in the Salvation Army.

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word, and it arrived in English in the late 1300s directly from the Hebrew, undoubtedly from its use in Judges 12:4-6. In Hebrew it means both "flood or stream" and "ear of corn." (Don't ask me why those two! Maybe a Hebrew scholar can post a comment to explain.)

Here's the Judges story: the Gileadites were fighting the Ephraimites, and in order to protect themselves from Ephraimites posing as Gileadites they decided to use the password "shibboleth" because Ephraimites could not produce the "sh-" sound. This led in English to the word shibboleth meaning "watchword" or "password" as it has since the 1630s. It wasn't until 1862 it developed the meaning of an outmoded slogan or common saying with little current meaning.

This isn't the only instance of a word being used to distinguish one nationality from another. In 1282, during a massacre called the Sicilian Vespers (now THERE's a title for a movie about the mafia) the Italians used the shibboleth cicera to identify those who were French, because they could not pronounce the word that means "chick peas." Apparently they could pronounce garbanzo, though.