"Shibboleth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comparative values. Being an intelligent man he said frankly at the outset that he knew very little on the subject. He had, however, in common with all of us, heard the word "asbestos" used as a shibboleth for years, but he desired definite knowledge, and after he had digested the information he should act on his judgment. I devoted sufficient time to him to put him in possession of the salient points of the subject. His ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... is a cultivated lady, accustomed to talking with people of our world—people who know England and its great houses well enough to have made her familiar with the knowledge of where certain pieces of famous furniture are.—The very phrasing of her sentences is the phrasing of our Shibboleth, and not the phrasing of the ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... thinnest layer of varnish, and might well take lessons in the religion of appearances and that thing which we call "manner." Madame did know at least how to bear herself with the seeming of a lady, and could say her shibboleth as it ought to be said. Thus, she ate with delicacy and held her knife nicely poised and balanced, but Leam grasped hers like a whanger, and cut off pieces of meat anyhow, which as often as not she took from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... walked straight into us. He threw himself on his knees at my feet and lifted his hands with a biblical gesture of supplication crying out, 'Ar-rab, Ar-rab,' an effective, though probably unmerited, shibboleth. As he knelt his women at the other end of the camp were driving off the village flock. Here I remembered that I was alone with the guide of a column in an event which ought to have been as historic as the relief ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... said John, as gravely as possible, "and no doubt the shallow-hearted, the stupid, the selfish are to be found everywhere, and belonging to either sex; but, nevertheless, solid virtue and true kindness are to be met with among the dames of Mayfair as among the matrons of the country-side. Their shibboleth is different, that's all. Perhaps—it is possible—that the speech of the town ladies is the more charitable, that they seek more persistently to do good to their fellow-creatures. I don't know. Comparisons are odious, but so," he added, with a slight laugh, "are general conclusions, founded ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... protective duty. It is a curious historical fact that this article, wool, seems to be the chief bone of contention ever since; in our tariffs nothing has been more bitter than the dispute on wool; the duty on wool is the shibboleth of the extreme protectionist.[1] Ohio, which is the home of the strong protection feeling, regards the duty on wool as the corner-stone to the whole fabric. It is argued that "a cheap coat makes a cheap man." In the ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... unite are the most important ones—that they shall bulk largest in our hearts and minds. And if they do, we shall know our brother in every man that is like-minded with us towards them, whatever shibboleth may separate us. I spoke a moment ago about the separate pools on the beach, and the tide rising. When the tide goes down, and the spiritual life ebbs, the pools are parted again. And so ages of feeble spiritual vitality have been ages of theological controversy about ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... response was the bitter shibboleth—"Carajo!" showing that both were uneasy about the dog. Long before this time both had heard of the fame of Cibolo, though neither had a full knowledge of the perfect training to which that sagacious animal ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... is slapped in the face and insulted. The translation of it is this: The man questioned, who is aware that as regards coat, hat, boots, and outward cleanliness he is below him by whom he is questioned, unconsciously feels himself called upon to assert his political equality. It is his shibboleth that he is politically equal to the best, that he is independent, and that his labor, though it earn him but a dollar a day by porterage, places him as a citizen on an equal rank with the most wealthy fellow-man that may employ or accost ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... moment, so that the men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.' How little we know of all this, seated in comfort and affluence here at the North, descanting upon the rights of every man to cast one vote and have it fairly counted; that well-worn shibboleth invoked once more to dodge a ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... which gave rise to bitter animosities. The churches of Africa were rent by their implacable feuds, and on so small a matter,—even as the ranks of the reformers under Luther were so soon divided by the Anabaptists. In proportion to the unimportance of the shibboleth was tenacity to it,—a mark which has ever characterized narrow and illiberal minds. It is not because a man accepts a shibboleth that he is narrow and small, but because he fights for it. As a minute critic would cast out from the fraternity of scholars him who cannot tell the difference ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... successes it had gained in the quasi-war with France just ended. They were tired also of a policy which was utterly at odds with their boast that all men were born free and equal, and the nation was roused with the shibboleth that there were "millions for defence, but not one ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... Custine, were removed, and, eventually, were all sent to the scaffold. Sans-culottes, some honest, some capable, many dishonest, many {190} incapable, replaced them. Sans-culottism reigned supreme. Civic purity became the universal test; and on this shibboleth the Commune inaugurated a system of politics of which the Tammany organization in New York offers the most conspicuous example at the beginning of the 20th century. Hebert was the party boss; his nominees filled the offices; graft was ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... Shibboleth of international courtesy in these days of big Iron-clad Fleets should surely be, "May it please ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... Folly had reached across the sea to scratch him again, for the note was well written in a bold, round hand. It was short because Folly combined the wisdom of the serpent with the voice of a dove. She knew the limits of her shibboleth of culture, and never passed them. She said only the things she had learned to write ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... appear to oppose it. For the truth is, that popular infidelity—to borrow Mr. Caudle's simile of tyrants—is only Puritanism turned inside out. We see this, even when it is masked in French flippancy and the Shibboleth of the current accomplishments of literature—it betrays itself by its vindictiveness and conceit, by its cruelty, sarcasms, and meanness—with the infidel as with the bigot. The sincere seeker for truth, whether he ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... at the foot of the mountain trail. And the voice of the tree in the eager spring airs said to her waiting heart—whispered it softly, shouted and tossed it abroad so that all might have heard it had they been awake and known the shibboleth, murmured it in tones of tenderness that penetrated her with bliss—that Creed was coming—coming—coming to her, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... Father in the Gosple,' the mask seems to be torn off, and the wages of godliness appear too openly. Capacity is a secondary matter in a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law. Common decency is at times forgot in the same page with the most sanctified advice and aspiration. Thus I am introduced to a correspondent who appears to have been at the time the housekeeper at Invermay, ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... presently the answer appeared: If white and black men and women eat and drink together, play and work together,—then they will intermarry, and the white race will become mixed and degenerate. So that became the conviction, the creed, the shibboleth, of the Southern whites,—race purity, to be safeguarded by complete prohibition of all social intimacy, especially as symbolized by the common meal. And the prohibition was enforced among the whites by the penalty of sure and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Theology, at the age of seven, is not commendable—setting aside the question of whether (at any age) Theology is a web of words, ritual, dogma, tradition, invention, shibboleth; a web originally spun by interested men to obscure ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... shibboleth of a sect or the cabalistic insignia of philosophy; it excludes all error and includes all Truth. More mistakes are made in its name than this period comprehends. Divinely defined, Science is the atmosphere of God; humanly construed, and according to Webster, it is ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... so that, while the canvass is up and on, it shall have steered between "the rocks of too much danger and pale fear" and reached the port of victory. Experience during the period since last it met may have had much to do with silence or brief mention of the heretofore darling shibboleth with which they were wont to inspire the faithful, rally the laggards, or capture converts. "Consistency, thou art a jewel" that dazzles, confuses, but doth not bewilder the ordinary politician, who can allow a former policy noiseless and forsaken to sink into the maelstrom of neglected ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British ministry the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of policy." ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... please!" he announced with a defiant glance at the singer lady up from under the rampant curl, and that he did not fail in his usual shibboleth of courtesy was due to his habitual use of it, rather than a desire to soften the effect of ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you got your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth, and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless (like the pole-cat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... As might be this doctrine of a great triangle, so is the doctrine of Home Rule. Why is a gentleman of property to be kept out in the cold by some O'Mullins because he will not mutter an unmeaning shibboleth? "Triangular? Yes,—or lozenge-shaped, if you please; but, gentlemen, I am the man for Tipperary." Phineas Finn, having seen, or thought that he had seen, all this, began, from the very first moment of his appointment, to consider painfully within himself ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and blood are ever seen there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm eyes, eating uncooked grain, out of baskets, and discoursing in a sublime shibboleth of which mortals have no key. But how could Plato Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea, in a New England January, clad only in a suit of linen, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... This shibboleth is the logical result of the attitude mentioned. Doubtless, the home is woman's sphere; but the home includes all that pertains to it—city, politics and taxes, laws relating to the protection of minors, municipal ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... localities, and were not readily to be caught by a cross-examination as to the topographical features, public institutions, or prominent inhabitants of the places where they pretended to belong. The best shibboleth I ever hit upon lay in the pronunciation of the word "been," which the English invariably make to rhyme with "green," and we Northerners, at least (in accordance, I think, with the custom of Shakespeare's ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... who jumped with his humour, from the hospitality he was always ready to offer, be the agreeable acquaintance Whig, Tory, or Radical. But in the county of which he was lord-lieutenant, the old party distinction was still a shibboleth by which men were tested for their fitness for social intercourse, as well as on the hustings. If by any chance a Whig found himself at a Tory dinner-table—or vice-versa— the food was hard ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... visited in the week. The care and training of street arabs had been his passion when he was still a student at Manchester New College. Then had come his moment of utterance—a thirst for preaching, for religious influence; though he could not bring himself to accept any particular shibboleth or take any kind of orders. He found something congenial for a time to a deep though struggling faith in the leadership of the Christian Brethren. Now, however, something had broken in him; he could preach no more. But he could go back to his old school; he could teach his boys on ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that he had a mission to bring labor into its own. The coming of the Democracy of Labor was a real democracy to him—no mere shibboleth. And as he rode through the rows of wooden tenements, where he knew men and women were being crushed by the great industrial machine, he thought of the tents in the fields; of the women and children and of the old and the sick going out there to labor through the day to piece out the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of mutual bulletins of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress for approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their own. An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful spirits take enlargement, under the consciousness of brotherhood. There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as steady-going and systematic in their ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... think," "It has been observed" instead of "I have seen," "The present writer" instead of "I," is much the more really egotistical. Try to write an essay without using that vowel which some men think the very shibboleth of egotism, and the remembrance of yourself will be in the background of your mind all the time you are writing. It will be always intruding and pushing in its face, and you will be able to give only half your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... God's dumb creatures tortured, Racial hatreds never cease, And man's greatest self-delusion Is the shibboleth of "Peace." ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... unwavering, direct cut. Do not pretend not to see them, or to look fixedly in another direction, but give them the vacant, absent stare, as if you saw around them, and through them, and the image before you excited neither attention nor recollection. There are no terms to be kept with them. Their Shibboleth is not yours. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... Britain, well known to deal in such commodities, and to whom he was instructed to address himself in a particular phrase and with a certain sign, which, it seems, passed at that time current among the initiated Jacobites. The moment Mr. Pembroke had uttered the Shibboleth, with the appropriate gesture, the bibliopolist greeted him, notwithstanding every disclamation, by the title of Doctor, and conveying him into his back shop, after inspecting every possible and impossible place of concealment, he commenced: 'Eh, Doctor!—Well—all under the rose—snug—I ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... to appropriate ten thousand pounds sterling toward an expedition to effect the conquest of Canada. Acadia had just fallen into the hands of Gov. Francis Nicholson without firing a gun, and the news had carried the New Yorkers off their feet. "On to Canada!" was the shibboleth of the adventurous colonists; and the expedition started. Eight transports, with eight hundred and sixty men, perished amid the treacherous rocks and angry waters of the St. Lawrence. The troops that had gone overland returned in chagrin. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... party, held truly orthodox opinions, and did their pastoral work as faithfully as ever Chalmers did after his great change of sentiment. It is curious to know that while party feeling ran high in the Scotch Church, it was a shibboleth of the Moderate party to use the Lord's Prayer in the Church service. The other party rejected that beautiful compendium of all supplication, on the ground that, it was not a Christian prayer, no mention ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... about those red tabs? The expression "red tabs" is, however, employed rather as a shibboleth; staff-officers must be distinguished somehow when they are not wearing armlets, and were the tabs less conspicuous there would be no special harm in them. It is the red band round the cap that is so utterly inappropriate ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... who, in many departments, ways, make the building up of the masses, by building up grand individuals, our shibboleth: and in brief that is the marrow of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Susan! As we look back with the knowledge of our later life, we translate the heart-burnings as unconscious protests against labeling your free soul, against testing your reasoning conviction of to-morrow by any shibboleth of to-day's belief. We hail this child-intuition as a prophecy of the uncompromising truthfulness of the mature woman. Susan Anthony was taught simply that she must enter into the holy of holies of her own self, meet herself, and be true to the revelation. She first found words ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... still the shibboleth in which the British believe, no less than our pioneers and Grant and Stonewall Jackson believed in it, and nothing throughout the Somme battle was so characteristically British as not only the stubbornness of their defense when small parties were surrounded, but the way in which they ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... competition by the establishment of state industries; equality of remuneration for labor; equality and legislative determination of the rate of interest; the choice of superintendents by the workmen. With many modern socialists, the shibboleth is not so much liberte as solidarite. Besides, Fichte's Naturrecht (1796), and his geschlossener Handelsstaat, are, without doubt, among the most remarkable works favoring an "organization of labor." They aim at the destruction of the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... "When you are saluted with a salutation, salute the person with a better salutation." The longer answer to "Peace be with (or upon) thee! " is still universally the custom. The "Salem" is so differently pronounced by every Eastern nation that the observant traveller will easily make of it a Shibboleth. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the great Liberal party what the helm is to the ship, appeals to the baser instincts and more pressing appetites of the people; the Conservative only to their traditions and higher aspirations, in the same way that religion appeals to the spirit, and the worship of Mammon to the senses. The shibboleth of the one is 'self-interest;' of the other, 'national honour.' The first appeals to the many, the second to the finer few, and I must leave you to judge ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... have only begun to attack!" declared Westerling. He liked that sentence. It sounded like the shibboleth of a great leader in a crisis. "I shall assault again ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... word often repeated, the word Huatinmio, began to enter largely into their conversation, and piqued the curiosity of the historiographer. Marcoy begged the interpreter to procure him the explanation of this perpetual shibboleth. Half by signs, half in the polyglot jargon which he had been employing with the Siriniris, Garcia managed to understand that the word in question was the name of their village, situated at a small distance and in a direction which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... you see how obsolete you are! 'Tis Handbooks make the Pedagogue: O great, eternal verity! O fact of which our ancestors could ne'er obtain a glimpse! But we'll proclaim the truth abroad and noise it to posterity, Our watchword a curriculum—our shibboleth DE GUIMPS! ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... elementary studies (what she knew of natural history, in fact, quite startled her teachers), and being also a teachable child, was allowed some latitude. As for Peggy herself, she kept her own faith unshaken; her little creed, whose shibboleth was not "to be afraid" of God's creatures, but to "love 'em," sustained her through reprimand, torn clothing, and, it is to be feared, occasional bites and scratches from the loved ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... men in the West, Jake Studley took the view that all men are equal, and that the interests of one are the concerns of all. A civil answer to what in other climes would be considered impertinent curiosity was the unmistakable shibboleth of the coequal fraternity. Hartwell's manner had been interpreted by Jakey as a declaration of heresy to his orthodox code and the invitation to mind his own business as a breach of etiquette which the code entailed. Jakey thereupon ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... this bout? A little, said I. To tell you the truth of it, quoth he, never were the Ephraimites in a greater fear and quandary when the Gileadites killed and drowned them for saying sibboleth instead of shibboleth; and among friends, let me tell you that perhaps there is not a man in the whole country of Beauce but might easily have stopped my bunghole with a ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... simplicity of his manners did not convince them. They seemed to hold by some complicated code of etiquette for ladies and gentlemen—Heaven knew how they had become possessed of it—of which he fell sadly short. He did not understand in the least their shibboleth of flirtation, their particular methods of banter, the precise shade of significance of their facial expressions and movements, the exact values of their phrases and catch-words; all of which was knowledge ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... Louis-the-Fifteenthian "M.A.," otherwise Maitre d'Armes, and a passing reference to "The People's WILLIAM" and the carrying out of the People's will—which is quite another affair,—all, to quote Sir PETER, "vastly entertaining." The chapter on the Shibboleth "Education" is, thinks the Baron, about the best. Mr. LILLY is a Satirist who, as GEORGIUS MEREDITHIUS MAGNUS might express it, is, in his fervour, near a truth, grasps it, and is moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... of witches' shibboleth was that which you brought off in Siegelman's?" asked Curtis, while the car was humming placidly ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... in the pure doctrine of the Gospel," such was the shibboleth of the faithful Lutherans over against the Melanchthonians and other errorists. But this was neither reprehensible doctrinalism nor a corruption of original Lutheranism, but the very principle from which it was born and for which Luther contended throughout his life—a principle of life or ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the day's Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays Nocturnes of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow links In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith; O bearer of their order's shibboleth, Like some pale symbol fluttering ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... the Lords spiritual and temporal," pronounced from a Scottish pulpit, in the proem to the Porteous Proclamation. These oaths were, therefore, a deep compliance and dire abomination—a sin and a snare, and a danger and a defection. But this shibboleth was not always exacted. Ministers had respect to their own tender consciences, and those of their brethren; and it was not till a later period that the reins of discipline were taken up tight by the General Assemblies and ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... springs of democracy; and the Americanism which was indifferent or suspicious of the spread of democracy in Europe would incur and deserve the enmity of the European peoples. Such an attitude would constitute a species of continental provincialism and chauvinism. Hence there is no shibboleth that patriotic Americans should fight more tenaciously and more fiercely than of America for the Americans, and Europe for the Europeans. To make Pan-Americanism merely a matter of geography is to deprive it of all serious meaning. Pan-Slavism or Pan-Germanism, based upon a racial bond, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Yorkshire tongue to utter a single word of Gaelic. It was in vain Robin spent a whole morning, during a walk over Minch Moor, in attempting to teach his companion to utter, with true precision, the shibboleth LLHU, which is the Gaelic for a calf. From Traquair to Murder Cairn, the hill rung with the discordant attempts of the Saxon upon the unmanageable monosyllable, and the heartfelt laugh which followed every failure. They had, however, better ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... were exchanged by the three gentlemen. I had stumbled upon their shibboleth, and proclaimed myself an Ephraimite, and not of Gilead. I have no doubt that up to that moment they had considered me as one of themselves—a member, and perhaps a priest, of their own ancient, grand, and imposing religion, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... shibboleth: "The Bible, and the Bible only, must be your guide." Why, then, do you go to the useless expense of building fine churches and Sabbath-schools? What is the use of your preaching sermons and catechizing the young, ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... vanquisht Kings; And how ingrateful Ephraim Not worse then by his shield and spear Had dealt with Jephtha, who by argument, Defended Israel from the Ammonite, Had not his prowess quell'd thir pride In that sore battel when so many dy'd Without Reprieve adjudg'd to death, For want of well pronouncing Shibboleth. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... This is better than a thump on the back with a stone; said on giving any one a drink of good liquor on a cold morning. Thatch, thistle, thunder, and thump; words to the Irish, like the Shibboleth ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... of these asses met there would be an anxious, 'Have you your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes,' That was the shibboleth, and a very needful one too; for as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless like a ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... number taking up the name specifically, with a determination to stick to it denominationally, is small. In all large towns a few of this complexion may be found; and in Preston odd ones exist whose shibboleth is "Christian Brethren." We had a spell with them, rather unexpectedly, on a recent "first day"—"Christian Brethren" always call Sunday the first day. And it came about in this way: we were on the point of entering a Dissenting place of ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... cathedral depends for its support." (Rockstro, "History of Music," p. 269.) Now this is all very fine, but it is nonsense, for Mozart's sonatas are anything but cathedrals. It is time to cast aside this shibboleth of printer's ink and paper and look the thing itself straight in the face. It is a fact that Mozart's sonatas are compositions entirely unworthy of the author of the "Magic Flute," or of any composer with pretensions to anything beyond mediocrity. They ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Men are not born equal, nor do they become equal before their death-days even in condition, except by artificial levelling; and in republics and limited monarchies, where all are politically equal, the greatest social inequalities ever prevail. Still falser is the shibboleth-crow of the French cock, "Libert, Egalit, Fraternit," which has borrowed its plumage from the American Bird o' Freedom. And Douglas Jerrold neatly expressed the truth when he said,—"We all row in the same boat but ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... The shibboleth of duty to own a home has so strong a hold on the moral sense of the people that it is made use of by the promoter who may in some cases think himself the philanthropist he intends others to call ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... proper status of the Negro," is as consistently maintained by the South in eighteen hundred and ninety-nine as in eighteen hundred and sixty, when it was made the shibboleth of the Slavery Party and the tocsin of war; and there can be no proper consideration of our present Negro Problem without regard ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... character is usually pronounced 'hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to the {ha ha only serious} suggestion that it be pronounced 'shibboleth' (see Judges 12.6 ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... had sensed the fact that money was becoming a power in American politics. He saw that money and slavery tended to become allies with the inevitable result of a shift of gravity in the American social system. "Humanity" had once been the American shibboleth; it was giving place to a new shibboleth-"prosperity." And the people who were to control and administer prosperity were the rich. The rights of man were being superseded by the rights of wealth. Because of its place in this new coalition ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... and the mellow Roman; the sibilation of England, the brogue of Ireland, the shibboleth of the Minories, the twang of certain American States, the guttural expectoration of Germany, the nasal emphasis of France, and even the modulated Hindoostanee, and the sonorous Spanish, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... then do it with the least possible expenditure of worry and nerve-force. Be in the open air as much as you can, and above everything else dwell not on the unhealthy state of your nerves. Let self-mastery be your shibboleth and 'no ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... ones are much divided about Schoeffer. Some say he is no painter. Nothing seems to me so utterly without rule or compass as this world of art Divided into little cliques, each with his shibboleth, artists excommunicate each other as heartily as theologians, and a neophyte who should attempt to make up a judgment by their help would be obliged to shift opinions with ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Presbyterian Elder, Baptist deacon, A local preacher, three or four class-leaders, Anxious inquirers, and renewed backsliders, A score in all—to watch the river ferry, (As they of old did watch the fords of Jordan,) And cut off all whose Yankee tongues refuse The Shibboleth of the Nebraska bill. And then, in answer to repeated calls, I gave a brief account of what I saw In Washington; and truly many hearts Rejoiced to know the President, and you And all the Cabinet regularly hear ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... probably picked up intelligence for these scandalous chronicles. The writers, too, condescended to intersperse the cant dialect of the populace, with which the cobblers doubtless assisted these learned men, when busied in their buffoonery. Hence all their vulgar gibberish; the Shibboleth of the numerous class of their admirers—such as, "O, whose tat?" John Kankerbury, for Canterbury; Paltri-politans, for Metropolitans; See Villains, for Civilians; and Doctor of Devility, for Divinity! and more of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... vastly genteel. We even had our shibboleth, a verdict to be passed before anything could hope for toleration in Troy. The word to be pronounced was "CUMEELFO," and all that ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fraternity; nor have I in liberty when liberty means license; whether that be so or not equality is not consistent with military discipline. An army in which the idea of equality reigns is not an army but a mob, and is no more use for fighting purposes than so many armed peasants. The Shibboleth is always absurd and in a case like the present ruinous. The first duty of a soldier is obedience, absolute and implicit, and a complete surrender of the right ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... some quarters, the power and charm of the book were universally admitted. At dinner parties, and in all circles where literature is discussed at all, 'Illusion' was becoming a standard topic; friendships were cemented and intimacies dissolved over it; it became a kind of 'shibboleth.' ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... with all her senses quivering, that saying, "Until the heaven's fallen," was frightening beyond the rest. On the lips of her husband, those lips which had never spoken in metaphors, never swerved from the direct and commonplace, nor deserted the shibboleth of his order, such words had an evil ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of a primitive community, the model on which society was to be refashioned. What the "pure word of God" had been to the Reformers, that "Nature" became to the revolutionists in all departments of thought and action, in poetry and music as in philosophy and politics—a shibboleth to rally and unite all the elements of discontent and aspirations for change, a universal test by which to try all doctrines and systems. In either case, as was soon discovered, the test would itself admit of diverse interpretations; but in the mean while the solvent had taken effect, the authority ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... doubtless it soon will be. In each case we showed the practical governmental genius of our race by devising methods suitable to meet the actual existing needs, not by insisting upon the application of some abstract shibboleth to all our new possessions alike, no matter how incongruous ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... died rich. And if his eyes were blurred With big films—silence! he is in his grave. Greatly he suffered; greatly, too, he erred; Yet broke his heart in trying to be brave. Nor did he wait till Freedom had become The popular shibboleth of courtier's lips; He smote for her when God Himself seemed dumb And all His arching skies were in eclipse. He was a-weary, but he fought his fight, And stood for simple manhood; and was joyed To see the august broadening of the light ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... verbiage. The single dogma worth attacking or defending is the divine right of kings. Are men, in the old phrase, born saddled and bridled, and other men ready booted and spurred, or are they not? That is the single shibboleth which distinguishes true men from false. Others, he says, bowed their heads to the image of the beast. 'I spit upon it, and buffeted it, and pointed at it, and drew aside the veil that then half concealed it.' This passionate denial of the absolute right of men over their ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the devil take the hindmost; the three or four hindmost if you will; nay, all but those strong-running horses who can force themselves into noticeable places under the judge's eye. This is the noble shibboleth with which the English youth are now spurred on to deeds of—what shall we say?—money-making activity. Let every place in which a man can hold up his head be the reward of some antagonistic struggle, of some grand competitive examination. Let us get rid of the fault of past ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... half-famished, Guy rubbed hands that would have felled an ox, and chuckled out, "Such fun!" If we stuck in a bog, if we were caught in a thunder-storm, if we were pitched head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break in, Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder heart never ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sins, which are thereupon no longer "imputed" to him. In other words, he is outwardly accounted and declared righteous in the sight of God, though inwardly he remains a sinner. With the exception of "sola fides" there was probably no shibboleth in the sixteenth century so persistently dinned into the ears of Catholics and Protestants alike as "iustitia Christi extra nos." It is found in the Apologia written in defence of the Augsburg Confession(905) and recurs in the Formula of Concord.(906) According ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... is to-day the great panacea,—the political nostrum; as such it is confidently advocated by statesmen and professors and even by the presidents of our institutions of the advanced education. "Trust the People" is the shibboleth! "Let the People rule!" "The cure for too much Liberty is more Liberty!" To Democracy plain and simple—Composite Wisdom—I frankly confess I feel no call,—no call greater than, for instance, towards Autocracy or Aristocracy or Plutocracy. Taken simply, and applied as hitherto applied, ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... of their teachers, they lost no time in bettering the instruction they received, using their models as mere stepping stones on the way to those unsurpassed and unsurpassable achievements which are all their own. The shibboleth of Art is [107] the human figure. The ancient Chaldaeans and Egyptians, like the modern Japanese, did wonders in the representation of birds and quadrupeds; they even attained to something more ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... treatment of the King, and his early sympathy with the rebels. As Clarendon himself says, [Footnote: Life, i 425.] "They were all, or pretended to be, the most implacable enemies to the Marquis of Argyle; which was the 'Shibboleth' by which the affections of that whole ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... "Clarion" had its retort pat for the tribe of "I-told-you-so," admitting the prospect of some primary harm to save a great disaster later. More than one hundred lives, it pointed out, giving names and dates, had already been sacrificed to the shibboleth of secrecy; the whole city had been imperiled; the disease had set up its foci of infection in a score of places, and there were some three hundred cases, in all, known or suspected. One method only could cope with the situation: the fullest public information ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... which I once have known, The perfume of this flower of verse is blown. Tho' seemingly soul-blossoms faint to death, Naught that with joy she bears e'er withereth. So, tho' the pregnant years have come and flown, Lives come and gone and altered like mine own, This poem comes to me a shibboleth: Brings sound of past communings to my ear, Turns round the tide of time and bears me back Along an old and long untraversed way; Makes me forget this is a later year, Makes me tread o'er a reminiscent track, Half sad, half ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... and they not a hundred pence," laughed Grimbeard. "It is not that I respect noble blood. I have scant cause. A wandering priest who came to say mass for us told us the story of Jephthah and the Gileadites; I will try the effect of a Shibboleth, too. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... in the present day about genius, as every thing in poetry: there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing all sorts of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibboleth of a critical party of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which it occupied in their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score successive couplets ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... our revolutionary fathers—in convention assembled—declared their independence of the mother country; solemnly asserted the divine right of self-government and its relation to constituted authority. With liberty their shibboleth, the colonies triumphed in their long and fierce struggle with the mother country, and established an independent government. They adopted a "bill of rights" embodying their ideal ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... upon the freedom of the world; after the most painstaking and patient efforts to avoid conflict, during which he was subjected to humiliation and insult, we see him grasp the sword, calling a united nation to arms in clarion tones, like some Crusader of old; his shibboleth: DECENCY, HUMANITY, LIBERTY. ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it has a far greater merit—utility. I have no sympathy with the flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, "Art for art's sake"; that is the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure; of a popular conscience anaesthetized; the cry of sensualism and selfishness popular with shallow minds and bloodless hearts; the incarnation of that fatal effeminacy that springs from a union of wealth and superficial intellectuality; the voice ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... Piazza Holiday Barbarous Disgust Heavy Kind Virtu Nightmare Devil Gospel Comfort Whist Mermaid Pearl Onion Enthusiasm Domino Book Fanatic Grotesque Cheat Auction Economy Illegible Quell Cheap Illegitimate Sheriff Excelsior Emasculate Danger Dunce Champion Shibboleth Calico Adieu Essay Pontiff Macadamize Wages Copy Stentorian Quarantine Puny Saturnine Buxom Caper Derrick Indifferent Boycott Mercurial Gaudy Countenance Poniard ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... of Milton. This is curious, that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day—in Spain, at any rate—what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (vide my Tres Ensayos). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its periphery remains outside of it—Spain, of course, and also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia—and ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... over that now. They have developed into sufficiently old soldiers to have acquired the correct military attitude towards manual labour. Trench-digging is a "fatigue," to be classed with, coal-carrying, floor-scrubbing, and other civilian pursuits. The word "fatigue" is a shibboleth with, the British private. Persuade him that a task is part of his duty as a soldier, and he will perform it with tolerable cheerfulness; but once allow him to regard that task as a "fatigue," and he will shirk ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... dispersion, than The stammering young ones of the flood's dull ooze, 110 Who failed and fled each other. Why? why, marry, Because no man could understand his neighbour. They are wiser now, and will not separate For nonsense. Nay, it is their brotherhood, Their Shibboleth—their Koran—Talmud—their Cabala—their best ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... return to Manila." [12] He reported secretly to Bonifacio, who bestowed several choice Tagalog epithets on Rizal, and charged his envoy to say nothing about the failure of his mission, but rather to give the impression that he had been successful. Rizal's name continued to be used as the shibboleth of the insurrection, and the masses were made to believe that he would appear as their leader at ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... acclamation, outcry, clamor, vociferation, yoicks, scream, shriek, howl, yell, proclamation; slogan, shibboleth; halloo, whoop, hoot: crying, weeping, wail, lamentation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... could talk without being understood by the common crowd. You find velgar criminals thet know some French, German, Spenish or Portegese, bet none thet know Letin. In dealing with higher class criminals we used our own gibberish or artificial shibboleth." ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Closerstil and Mr Romer saunter down the High Street, arm in arm, declared that it was all up with poor Moffat; but others, in whose head the bump of veneration was strongly pronounced, whispered to each other that great shibboleth—the name of the Duke of Omnium—and mildly asserted it to be impossible that the duke's ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Bartlett calls this the "shibboleth of Bostonians." However this may be, it is simply an archaism, not a vulgarism. Show, like blow, crow, grow, seems formerly to have had what is called a strong preterite. Shew is used by Lord Cromwell and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... to a nation, as a fan to the floor, which purges away the chaff and purifies the wheat. It is like the furnace to the metal, which takes away the dross and shews you a refined lump. It is a Shibboleth, to distinguish Ephraimites from Gileadites. And who knows not how great an advantage it is for the successful carrying on of any honourable design, to know friends from enemies, and the faithful from false brethren? Some have thought it unpolitical ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various |
