Estimado Lector (y todos mis amigos a través del Atlántico),
Greetings from Barcelona. And it is Bar•ce•lona, not Barth•e•lona. That pronunciation is a shibboleth of the Castilian hegemony, and I am decidedly on the side of the Catalan separatists (I suppose this means I should have written "Benvolgut Lector (i tots els meus amics de l'Atlàntic).")
Shibboleth is a fun word, and not just because it sounds like what one of the kids from Fat Albert would say if he went to prison, got hard and mean, and told someone to "Shiv old Les." You know like, "Shib ol' leth in da shower durin' the guard change."
For those who don't know, it comes from the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible. Long story short, the Gileadites beat the stuffing out of the Ephraimites. When the surviving Ephraimites wanted to get past the River Jordan incognito, the Gileadites had a test to tell them apart from other travelers. They first asked the strangers if they were Ephraimites. If they said "No," the soldiers asked them to say the word "shibboleth," which referred either to a part of a grain plant or maybe a flood. But the definition didn't matter, the ...
