Untitled Document

I don't recall precisely how it began, but I casually encouraged the students in my Jurisprudence seminar one day to note words in their reading they didn't already know and then write them on the board as the next class began so that we might all learn them. One of my students, Robin, took me up on it and began to write a word on the board each day: eleemosynary or elegiac, for example. Just yesterday others seem to have caught the fire from Robin, and we had eudaemonic and ukase and atavistic, to mention three. I am delighted. In honor, then, of my students, I dedicate this essay on some words beginning with "s" which have a colorful history, which I call my "s-words." If you drop the dash, you have what words, when used powerfully, can become: swords. I will briefly discuss shibboleth and supercilious in this essay.

Shibboleth

Shibboleth is not used terribly frequently in our conversation, but when used it generally means "a catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect, by which their adherents or followers are discerned." Thus, in today's speech, it is a code word or slogan. In political speech today it often is used synonymously with mantra--an oft-repeated, and often seemingly meaningless, slogan which is intoned by the faithful. For the last twenty-years the Republicans have been using the mantra of "no new taxes" or have characterized the Democrats as "tax and spend." They have been less successful today in describing Democrats as "cut and run," with respect to the Iraq War, principally because almost everyone in the country now wants to devise a way to get our troops out of that country. Actually, I think that mantra is gaining on shibboleth and will supersede the latter, principally because shibboleth takes too much work to pronounce.

But when I mention "pronounce," we are plunged into the actual origin of shibboleth. It is a Hebrew term, appearing in Judges 12:6. The men of Ephraim fought against Jephthah and the Gileadites. Jephthah devised the "shibboleth" test to distinguish between his people and the Ephraimites who wanted to cross the Jordan, held by his men. Whenever a person tried to cross the river, the Gileadites would ask the fugitive: "Are you an Ephraimite?" If the person admitted that he was, he would have been captured or killed. So, he would say, "No." To which the Gileadite would rejoin: "Then say Shibboleth." The Scripture then says tersely, "and he said, 'Sibboleth,' for he could not pronounce it right; then they seized him and slew him at the fords of the Jordan." Thus, the shibboleth test, in its origin, marked a person as a member of a group or party, usually for purposes of exclusion. We might also call it a "litmus test," which term could only develop after the invention of the word "litmus" in the early 16th century. Today, however, shibboleth primarily means a slogan, mantra (in political discourse) an unthinking phrase, and litmus test a means of distinguishing one group's beliefs from another.

Supercilious

The OED has no entry for cilium, but defines cilia as "eyelids, esp. the outer edges of the eyelids." The word goes back to 1715: "properly the utmost Edge of the Eye-lid, out of which the Hairs grow." Thus, at first the cilia were the slightly puffy edges of the eyelid in the region where the eye-lids sprout. But because the Latin word means hair, it was perhaps natural for the word to take on a meaning of the lashes themselves or, by extension, "delicate hairs resembling eye-lashes" which can form a fringe on the margin of leaves or some insects. There are more than 13,000 Google "hits" connecting "fringe" and "cilia," so if you are going to start using the latter word, yo uprobably should connect it with the former.

Something above the eyelid is the eyelash, which was known, by the 17th century, as the supercilium. So, it is striking to me that, according to the OED, the word with preposition (supercilium) actually predated the word sans preposition (cilia). From 1672 we have: "I marked how your answerer looked when he spoke of the day of judgment. Very gravely...and yet without any depressing or exalting his superciliums." The word can also refer to a "narrow fillet above the cymatium of a cornice," but this gets us into Attic pillars, which I have written about elsewhere but don't want to probe now. The architectural usage is first attested in 1563.

Now, of course, we are ready for supercilious. The word has reference to an action of the supercilium--a raised or furrowed or some kind of movement of the eyebrow to express a feeling of disdain or haughtiness. As early as 1529, even before supercilium apparently appeared, supercilous was used, though the OED's reference is not very clear. From 1609 we have: "Set your face, and looke superciliously, while I present you." John Dunne got into the act in 1627 when he said: "Some binde themselves exactly, rigidly, superciliously, yet superstitiously to the number of foure." Thus the current meaning of supercilious as haughty contempt or disdain is already established in the early 17th century.

Conclusion

Intelligent and even clever use of words doesn't assure you of success, happiness, love or anything really in life. It can, however, remove one more little piece of confusion from our lives. And, come to think of it, if we can remove some of the confusion, we have gone the first step towards reaching understanding, which isn't a bad thing to have in life.

2189