Alaskan Range: Shibboleth
"My daughter Hannah has amazed me for a long time. Her intellectual vitality and sense of fun were evident from infancy, and her siblings owe their very existences in part to the fact that she was such an easy, enjoyable first-born. Hannie’s well into adulthood now, and that’s introduced me to the unanticipated pleasure of the reciprocated liking one’s adult children as friends,'' writes columnist and librarian Greg Hill.
It wasn’t surprising, therefore, to see Hannah recently post on FaceBook her strong liking for the phrase “voiceless labiodental fricative,” and then dwelled on fricative’s generally. This particular fondness was new to me, so I researched these voiceless labdiodental fricatives. It couldn’t have come at a better time, because reading an online “Top Ten Grammar Peeves” list that led me to the word “shibboleth,” which contains a bunch of fricatives, but no “f’s,” the “voiceless labiodentals” variety.
The dictionary says fricatives “are consonants, such as ‘f’ or ‘s’ in English, produced by the forcing of breath through a constricted passage,” as opposed to larynx-produced sounds. The ‘f’ sound is made with “voiceless” non-larynx breath forced over a constriction produced by bringing the lower lip, or “labio,” close to the upper teeth, thus “voiceless labiodental f-as in fricative.”
The grammar peeve list was nothing exceptional, “affect is a verb, effect is a noun,” “literally means it actually happened, not that it figuratively happened,” and, number one: “it’s ‘I couldn’t care less.’ ‘I could care less’ means that you actually do care.” However, at hand was the library’s copy of “Woe Is I: the Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, Updated and Expanded Edition,” by Patricia T. O’Conner. My wife the teacher gave me an earlier edition years ago, and, checking into O’Conner’s book for what’s new in grammar, I saw a promising chapter titled “The Living Dead: Let Bygone Rules Be Gone.”
“The house of grammar has many rooms,” O’Conner writes, “and some of them are haunted … the ghosts of dead rules and spirits of imaginary taboos are still rattling and thumping about the old place.” The first dead rule listed is “Don’t split an infinitive.” Infinitives “can usually be recognized by the word ‘to’ in front of it: Blackbeard helped him to escape. But the ‘to’ isn’t actually part of the infinitive and isn’t always necessary.”
English phrases often sound more natural when the “to” is split from the infinitive verb because adverbs work best just before the verbs they modify, as in “helped him to quietly escape.” The flawed “don’t split infinitives” rule came about when well-meaning people tried to shove the round English language peg into the square structures of Latin hole by making English conform to Latin grammar rules. For that we can blame Robert Lowth, the Bishop of the Church of England in the late 1700s.
Lowth had many accomplishments, including being the first to recognize that the Biblical Psalms are actually poems. But then in 1762 he wrote “A Short Introduction to English Grammar” to correct the lack of grammatical rules books that had plagued his student days. The Wikipedia article on him states “Lowth’s grammar is the source of many of the prescriptive shibboleths that are studied in schools, and established him as the first in a long line of usage commentators who judge the English language in addition to describing it.”
Though written for university students, by 1770 versions of Lowth’s grammar were adapted for school children, “and Lowth’s stylistic opinions acquired the force of law in the schoolroom. “The textbook remained in standard usage throughout educational institutions until the early 20th century.” His precepts endured even longer, as I experienced long ago in Mrs. Strickland’s fifth grade English class proved.
A shibboleth is “a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.” The Bible says “shibboleth” was used to distinguish Isrealite soldiers from the fricative-deficient enemy, who pronounced it “shibboleth. A shibboleth example is the misconception that public libraries are nothing more than book warehouses. Nearly 1,000 people a day visit our borough public libraries to read, meet, communicate, listen, learn, and relax, and they can distinguish between shibboleths and sibboleths.
