Shibboleth
Shibboleth

Author: Marc Redfield

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 115

ISBN-13: 0823289087

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Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the policing of identities. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders. It has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. The various phenomena we sum up as neoliberalism and globalization are unimaginable in the absence of shibboleth-technologies. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. This book interprets the episode in Judges together with Celan’s poems and Jacques Derrida’s reading of them, as well as passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Redfield pursues the track of shibboleth: a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers a locus of poetico-political affirmation.

The Shibboleth
The Shibboleth

Author: John Hornor Jacobs

Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab ®

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1467739979

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"There are certain shibboleths to our condition." At the end of the first book of The Twelve-Fingered Boy Trilogy, Jack and Shreve are incarcerado―physically locked up. Shreve's back in the custody of the state of Arkansas, and Jack's somewhere in the clutches of Mr. Quincrux―both problems Shreve aims to rectify. Cages might hold Shreve's body, but the power that's been growing since his encounter with Quincrux has reached a pinnacle. Nothing can prevent his mind from scaling the etheric heights. Freed from his body, Shreve discovers the magnitude of the evil that's stirring in the east. The wave of insomnia that's paralyzed the nation is only the beginning.

The Language Wars
The Language Wars

Author: Henry Hitchings

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2011-10-25

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1429995033

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The English language is a battlefield. Since the age of Shakespeare, arguments over correct usage have been bitter, and have always really been about contesting values-morality, politics, and class. The Language Wars examines the present state of the conflict, its history, and its future. Above all, it uses the past as a way of illuminating the present. Moving chronologically, the book explores the most persistent issues to do with English and unpacks the history of "proper" usage. Where did these ideas spring from? Who has been on the front lines in the language wars? The Language Wars examines grammar rules, regional accents, swearing, spelling, dictionaries, political correctness, and the role of electronic media in reshaping language. It also takes a look at such details as the split infinitive, elocution, and text messaging. Peopled with intriguing characters such as Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and Lenny Bruce, The Language Wars is an essential volume for anyone interested in the state of the English language today or its future.

Marching to Shibboleth
Marching to Shibboleth

Author: The Firesign Theatre

Publisher:

Published: 2011-11

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9781593936624

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Finally available after thirty years, MARCHING TO SHIBBOLETH collects all the words (and sound effects) to Firesign's favorite audio comedies of the Seventies, including Waiting For the Electrician; How Can You Be In Two Places At Once; Nick Danger; Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers; I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and The Giant Rat of Sumatra. MARCHING TO SHIBBOLETH, now under the imprint of Bear Manor Books, reproduces both of Firesign's "Big Books," originally published in 1972 and 1974 by Straight Arrow. Designed by Jon Goodchild and Richard Silverstein, the texts are full of photographs, collages and weirdly cool typography typical of High Seventies Style. Phil Proctor edited the visuals and David Ossman the album transcripts for Firesign. Alan Rinzler was editor for Straight Arrow. Both books have been collector's items for a couple of decades. Collecting both under one cover puts the best known Firesign works together for the first time and provides readers with the unique word-for-word wordplay which was often confusing - er, confused with that of James Joyce during Firesign's heyday. The four major titles - Electrician, How Can You Be, Dwarf and Bozos collectively present Firesign's prescient look at technology, the media, American history and paranoia (especially in the classic "Beat The Reaper " gameshow.) The Giant Rat is their tribute to British "Goon Show" humor and Nick Danger, Third Eye has become the classic send-up of both the "noir" detective story and Golden Age radio.

The Lexicographer's Dilemma
The Lexicographer's Dilemma

Author: Jack Lynch

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-11-03

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0802719635

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In its long history, the English language has had many lawmakers--those who have tried to regulate or otherwise organize the way we speak. Proper Words in Proper Places offers the first narrative history of these endeavors and shows clearly that what we now regard as the only "correct" way to speak emerged out of specific historical and social conditions over the course of centuries. As historian Jack Lynch has discovered, every rule has a human history and the characters peopling his narrative are as interesting for their obsession as for their erudition: the sharp-tongued satirist Jonathan Swift, who called for a government-sponsored academy to issue rulings on the language; the polymath Samuel Johnson, who put dictionaries on a new footing; the eccentric Hebraist Robert Lowth, the first modern to understand the workings of biblical poetry; the crackpot linguist John Horne Tooke, whose bizarre theories continue to baffle scholars; the chemist and theologian Joseph Priestly, whose political radicalism prompted violent riots; the ever-crotchety Noah Webster, who worked to Americanize the English language; the long-bearded lexicographer James A. H. Murray, who devoted his life to a survey of the entire language in the Oxford English Dictionary; and the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who worked without success to make English spelling rational. Grammatical "rules" or "laws" are not like the law of gravity, or even laws against murder and theft--they're more like rules of etiquette, made by fallible people and subject to change. Witty, smart, full of passion for the world's language, Proper Words in Proper Places will entertain and educate in equal measure.