Sample Sentences for
shibboleth
grouped by contextual meaning
(editor-reviewed)

shibboleth as in:  a shibboleth of the upper class

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The pronunciation of certain words became a shibboleth, instantly revealing whether someone was a native speaker or an outsider.
shibboleth = something that identifies one as a member of a group
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    Knowing which fork to use first was once a shibboleth of the upper class, separating the socially educated from the uninitiated.
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    Her clothes were a kind of shibboleth to me; they signaled that she was not a gentile, and for a few hours I felt less alone.  (source)
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    But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.  (source)
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    That was the shibboleth—the cry by which she sounded the closed depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman's insatiate vanity.†  (source)
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    Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.†  (source)
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    He was gone; I did not even know that either since there is a metabolism of the spirit as well as of the entrails, in which the stored accumulations of longtime burn, generate, create and break some maidenhead of the ravening meat; ay, in a second's time,—yes, lost all the shibboleth erupting of cannot, will not, never will in one red instant's fierce obliteration.†  (source)
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    As her brain clouded over, as the memory of the views grew dim and the words of the book died away, she returned to her old shibboleth of nerves.†  (source)
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    It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict.  (source)
    shibboleth = something that identifies one as a member of a group
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shibboleth as in:  an outdated shibboleth

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The idea that you must work for the same company for 30 years to have a successful career has become a shibboleth, no longer reflecting the reality of the modern workplace.
shibboleth = an outdated belief
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A formula, a shibboleth meaningless as a child's game, performed by someone created by the situation whose need it answered: a crone mumbling in a dungeon lighted by a handful of burning hair, something in a tongue which not even the girls themselves understand anymore, maybe not even the crone herself, rooted in nothing of economics for her or for any possible progeny since the very fact that we acquiesced, suffered the farce, was her proof and assurance of that which the ceremony itself could never enforce; vesting no new rights in anyone, denying to none the old—a ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night, even to the same archaic and forgotten symbols?  (source)
shibboleth = an outdated custom
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