Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage
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Recently I had a corporate installed process maxing out my CPU so I went to the help desk to see the techs (the triager at the front desk thought it might be a fan issue and that I didn't know what was wrong). Since I was able to tell them the exact process and other details, they immediately recognized it as a specific issue they had seen before and we skipped the whole diagnosis back and forth. If I had gone in there and said, "the fan is running really high" I'd probably still be there.
Dear users everywhere: the point of the exercise is not to prove there is a problem. I believe you when you say there is a problem. I need enough context to understand what the problem is.
wpr -start GeneralProfile
do something, or let process spin
wpr -stop foo.etl
Include foo.etl with your bug report. Be aware that it will include personal information from your machine (machine config, user paths, process names, etc.).
edit:spelling
The assumptions made by a listener as a result of intentionally limited data are not your responsibility in any way, indeed even if you were able to predict them with any reasonable level of accuracy, which you are not.
I have an essay pending on this exact topic.
We all look forward to reaching a conclusion you didn't intend us to due to our assumptions.
http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Gricean_maxims
I find it unlikely that you really abide by this stated disregard of implicit assumptions - it would make communication impossible. The amount of information required to convey even basic facts is encyclopedic if you and your conversational partner don’t make use of assumptions about what the other already knows.
It turns out that if you abide by those linked rules, casual friendly discussions (things that are nonessential, for the most part) are pretty much ruled out. I find myself more often communicating with people who I have no explicit business or goal with, in social settings, and abiding by rules for cooperation on a team/task would make me a very boring person to speak to, indeed.
Basically communication is bidirectional, if the listener don't understand anything, it's probably their fault too.
Understanding is not a right or a gift, it's a process.
You can't force people to understand and no matter how you think about the listener, the listener have to do their part: listen.
I wouldn't say "probably". It might be. It might be the fault of the speaker. Or maybe both. Basically, my point was that it's not ONLY the listener's fault.
I.e., both sides have some level of expected interest/gain in successful communication and that makes each of them implicitly responsible (at least to themselves) for their part of gain from communication.
I fully agree. :-) My point was it does not fall only on the listener.
By this logic, one can lie by remaining entirely silent. I don't buy it.
Yup. An example would be listening to someone reach the wrong conclusion, and by staying silent and not correcting them, implying that they were correct.
The listener's assumptions (or lack thereof), which happen after the speaker speaks, cannot retroactively cause the statement to be or not be a lie.
However, the original point still applies. He does not suffer from these issues, and directly communicated that he did. That is a lie.
At no point did he directly communicate anything about custody in his statement.
You are confusing implication with direct statements.
Whether you deceive by purposefully implying a falsehood or by purposefully denoting a falsehood it is still a lie.
Seriously, how far are you willing to go in your attempts to justify lying? You are basically saying "If I define my lie this way, it isn't a lie"
It's far easier and better for all involved if you simply tell the truth.
Assume competence if they show competence
If they don't, assume they will be part of the problem, you won't get any help and they will make the situation worse
Installing an IDE just to have the icon to show for it is a stupid hack that'll stop working once people see through the charade.
OTOH, running the test suite and showing the failing tests or, if they pass, explaining very precisely what misbehavior you're seeing and how you reproduced it, is actually helpful.
Be helpful to the extent of your competence but honest about its limits. Trying to bullshit when you clearly have no clue makes you annoying to work with, but so does being a noob who doesn't even try to understand what's going on and just wants someone else to do all the work.
It's like going to a foreign country and making an effort to speak their language. Even if you're bad at it and end up having a conversation in your native language they'll respect you for the effort.
You wouldn't see a doctor and pretend to also be one but understanding some basic terminology and diagnostic procedure will help.
This breaks down when dealing with monopolies and companies that are too big to fail. Customer service in their case is always monkeys (from my experience) - they aren’t paid enough to care, they don’t know anything about their company’s product/service (because a skilled person wouldn’t put up with the low pay and working conditions) and have very limited power in actually fixing your problem even when they understand it.
In that case scaring them into escalating the call might be a better strategy than just running around in circles trying to make a monkey understand what you’re after.
What do you do if after all this, they still keep circling the problem?
If you want to add authority pick Y = Newspaper. If you think the person will respond better to you placing yourself societally lower, say 'online' and weaken your statement with something like "but who knows how true that is" etc.
The objective is to place the thought in their head but keep them believing they're putting the pieces together. You could even try "It's probably not Z, right? Like in that movie". There doesn't have to be a movie, no one will follow up.
This part is hard because you really need to read their reactions and make sure you come off not as a kook hypochondriac but as a bumbling layman who just happened upon the right thing.
Do it wrong and you'll be patronizing and insta-lose. Do it right and you'll get everything you want.
I employ this + being as non-threatening as possible (cheerful, less smart than, less powerful than) + minor groveling ("would you mind doing this anyway, I know you're probably right but it'll make me feel so much better").
I get pretty quick service everywhere, even where other people complain.
In general, though, this is last resort. Usually the fastest way to get good service is to rapidly and clearly comply with orders. Just like when you're debugging an issue, you've got a standard process, other professionals do too and letting them prune their search tree is important. You know that lingering feeling you have where you're like "maybe the DNS server is flaky, naaah it couldn't be"? That's what they're avoiding and giving that to them means you get bucketed it into "smooth interaction" which is superior to anything else because in the end, nothing works better than someone wanting to help you.
I think what method works best really depends on your personality type. I agree that the goal is to ensure that you are making the interaction smooth by get the person you're asking for help what they need. But I also see asking for help as two different modes.
1. I'm asking for help because I am not empowered (access controls, specialty tools) to fix my own issue, but if I had been so empowered I could have resolved it on my own easily.
2. I'm asking for help because I don't know the solution, but I'm competent enough to narrow it to a particular trouble area.
In #2, I acknowledge outright, internally and externally, that because I am asking for help I have reached the limit of my competence. My request is inherently respectful, because I'm acknowledging the superior competence of the person(s) I'm asking for help from, but out of respect for their time I do my best to ask a good question and provide all the necessary details to make helping me a low friction event.
In the case of #1... often it's better to aggressively establish your own competence to get them to just do what you need done. Unfortunately in the world of large organizations and bureaucracy you will deal with a lot of incompetent people who are put in a position of some tiny fraction of power over you. You need to get them to exercise that power to your benefit, but you also need to not alienate them so they withhold it. People with only a small amount of power can be extraordinarily vindictive, so it's best to approach them with a measure of respect, but also clearly establish the boundaries of the interaction so you can proceed as quickly as possible and be on with your life.
I've worked roles in which I was in both situations on the other side of the table, but I had enough self-awareness to realize when I was the monkey in #1 and I did my best to be as efficient as possible and let people get on with it. In situation #2, I understand very deeply the frustration of having someone essentially toss something over the wall and in so doing show their disrespect for your competence and the value of your time. As always, you want to go through life without making other people feel badly, but taking a submissive pathway will not always work for you, especially if that is not in your nature.
In the last fifteen years or so of adulthood, I've met few roadblocks. Perhaps I would take a different approach if that's what I saw.
You wouldn't do this with a doctor. You wouldn't do it with a police officer. So why do it with me? Or tech people? Are they somehow less impressive? I mean you are seeking their help. Maybe show some respect.
if you're ever at the garage waiting on a repair, just speak English. Yeah I know my questions are going to be a little basic and repetitive sometimes but they're for my understanding. What sounds like a waste of breath for you is actually helping me to formulate a solution and troubleshoot a problem. Work with me, not around me.
Doctors enjoy a higher reputation for "honesty and ethical standards" [1] and have the specter of medical malpractice if they yield a misdiagnosis, particularly if it's one that harms the patient. There is no equivalent for mechanics and frankly the public on average trusts mechanics far less than doctors. Auto mechanics got 32% in the high/very high trust category vs 67% for doctors in the latest Gallup poll. [1]
Anecdotally distrust of mechanics is such an issue I distinctly remember my youngest sister getting approached by car dealers from all over the city after she took auto shop in high school. She was told dealership repair shops needed women because some female customers simply didn't trust what they were being told by male repair shop representatives. Despite this apparent need the pay offered wasn't enough to entice her from just working at the O'Reilly Auto Parts down the street.
[1]
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions...
We have mandatory visits at work here in Italy and to save time when I go there, instead of following the usual routine, I say immediately: my grandfather suffered from high pressure, my mom has been curing her high pressure her entire life, I also probably have it so if you find high pressure, I know everything about it already. Also my parents worked in healthcare, you can use medical terms, I get those.
I also tells them I suffer from a genetic heart condition, not worrying, but existent.
It's called anamnesi, it's a necessary process to establish the patient's background and saves a lot of time to the both of us.
They don't have to explain to me that I should avoid using salt and all the side effects of a condition I know very well and I don't have to listen to things I already know, since 40 years ago.
> Present as if you are collecting a paper trail. Prominent indicia of this include notebooks, organized files, and repeatedly asking for specific names, dates, and citations for authority “for my notes.”
I worked at a smaller company where any semi-threatening support requests were escalated up the chain to me. The “I’m taking notes to use against you” trick was a sure-fire way to get your ticket escalated, but it had the reverse effect of what customers expected. Our front-line support was empowered to diagnose customer problems, issue refunds, replace product, and even give customers free upgrades as a token of apology.
However, once the customer threatened us with the note-taking act, we had to be extremely careful about anything that would admit fault, lest they try to use it against us later. Or worse, try to take our statements out of context and tweet them to the world. Once the customer escalated the request, they got slower responses (support wasn’t my primary job), more limited options (minimize potential admissions of fault), and narrowly constrained communications (assume every response will be retweeted out of context to make us look bad).
Before you try these “Dangerous Professional” tricks, please just try to be a decent human with the front-line support staff. They deal with difficult customers all day, and the last thing they want to do is encourage another person to play the difficult customer role to get what they want. The opening example (Xcode visible in dock creating mutual understanding) is very different than sending your demands directly to the company’s general counsel or threatening to take notes for future retaliation. Please don’t use that as option 1 in your communication toolbox.
In a company large enough to have a legal department, they'll hand you over to it, and basically nothing will get fixed. They'll record your complaints, dates, and times, and stop interacting with you.
There is another case also. The one of 'my (insert relative) is a lawyer'. In that case it's also an empty threat. Nobody is doing free legal work for family at least not more than a letter. Their time is what they bill for. The idea that they are going to take on major work with no outcome and not getting paid makes no sense. Are their contingency arrangements? Sure but most likely not for what someone is threatening legal action for.
It probably helped that the company is in a highly regulated industry.
I was completely serious about talking to a lawyer about this by the way. And they understood what my problem was. I'd guess that the support agents I spoke with were not authorized to do what I asked. They never told me that, though, they just refused to help. If I had to guess I'd say that they weren't authorized to transfer me to the right person unless I said certain keywords, "lawyer" being one of them.
[0] Maybe I did, as I was really frustrated after over an hour on the phone. But I only intended to talk to a lawyer.
- they aren’t tricks.
- making documentation and taking notes is something decent humans do.
- only less-than-decent people are threatened by documentation.
This is a rephrase of "only guilty people need to worry about privacy." But:
1. Are you sure you act perfectly above-board at ALL times? You don't occasionally say something that could be misconstrued, lose your temper, etc.?
2. Are you aware of all contractual clauses and laws you may be violating at any given time? Are you able to think about them, in real time, and always act perfectly?
You're absolutely right. I should have explicitly clarified the implied scope (which seemed obvious to me from the thread): in customer service events between a contractually-bound client and vendor.
In my experience, people who play this card have an almost-certain probability of using things like strategic ellipses or partial quotes against me later. Ever been in enterprise support and been hauled into a deposition where you got asked if a partial quote of yours was actually what you said when it technically was but not in that context? It's not fun.
When people pull that stunt on me, I absolutely turn into the most straight-laced automaton you've ever met. You will receive nothing more than the shortest sentences I can construct in the flattest monotone I can muster and I will do nothing more than the barest minimum required because I am not sticking my neck out for your shitty problem if you are angling for a way to throw me under the bus.
It cuts both ways.
EDIT: Just noticed the call recording angle is already discussed up-thread a bit; apologies for the dupe.
That is hardly fair as the whole "this conversation may be recorded for training purposes" puts the caller on edge right from the start. Are they allowed to record the call too? Is that legal?
Obviously, the caller should just record the call and tell the other side they are doing that. I guess most people don't know how to record calls.
>Is that legal?
For the most part yes.
>Obviously, the caller should just record the call and tell the other side they are doing that. I guess most people don't know how to record calls.
Yes they should. It's even better to take notes on things you miss by listening to the recording.
From experience, though, the people acting like "Dangerous Professionals" are just dangerous to my psychological well-being because it's almost impossible to distinguish them from any run-of-the-mill ass hole.
These people see the "numbers" (and that is the heart of any business). They can get your checks expedited (reimbursement or for vendors). They can tell you when a lay off is coming, or when the company blew out the numbers. Most of them keep booze at their desks. All of this will come at the price of coffee and doughnuts/pastries/baglels at the end of the fiscal year, or during an audit.
Needless to say I whipped up some easy to use scripts that did the job for him. It changed my relationship with that department.
You become visible and friendly. You're not just someone making work for them.
It would save time for tech support workers too; no need to vet very tech capable callers for things like ‘have you tried turning it off and on again’. So theoretically, the call wait time might even reduce for callers with simple/obvious questions.
There are probably some details to iron out and problems to solve, but the basic idea seems pretty feasible to me.
Nowadays I'm always trying to walk through the steps posted in the self help manuals before I actually call. If you tell them that you already did everything in this manual, they also move on quickly after a couple of questions to double check.
Most of the support cases I get (meaning they've escalated through 2 to 3 layers of support engineering) are XY Problems (1). The customers are smart, and typically their issue is knowing too much about one aspect of the thing they're trying to solve. They used the sickle to cut their wheat, so yup, they're going to use the sickle to dry it, bale it, and tow it to market.
Ignoring everything they're doing, and even their initial question, typically leads to better outcomes. (Except in the cases where it turns out they really do have to be doing it in this backwards manner).
Typically, skipping specific steps in common troubleshooting is not done unless the person provides some verification on a new case/call to validate that this step was indeed done, simply because even professionals make mistakes, but specific environmental factors, the person'(s) relative technical knowledge, their behavior in the past with support, common pain points in their environment, and other such things are all recorded pretty heavily.
Usually though this only means that you'll skip Tier 0/1 Support though for most companies. Usually there's always a small reserve of "big guns" that are reserved only for the cases that really need them.
Keep in mind though that this is mostly for companies that specifically look to work with Technology Professionals; when you're talking about generic Consumer Support, such a system is feasible but often non-sensical from any business perspective for the Companies when we're discussing Consumer Support. Comcast's monopoly is only one reason why they were able to weather "worst support ever" for so many years; the simple fact is that they got pretty good at handling vocal customers, or at least adding a public face that made most consumers not care. At best, with such supports, you'll just get X replaced regardless of what X is, and any issue that isn't solved by that tends to be over the head of most people's interests, so any outrage from highly technical persons mostly just gets ignored.
I know what you want, and you can get this with Tech Companies. But if you want fast and good support from Consumer Tech (ISPs, home tech, etc), you have two routes: play the game and just move through the motions ASAP, or post on Twitter and hope that you garner enough attention to escalate your case. Both are a waste of time and energy, IMO, and I know which one would take less of my time personally.
— Richard Stallman, 30 October 1986
Now I'm remembering accidentally seeing my customer record in a mobile phone shop. I was a "Silver customer". At that point I had been with them for 10 years or something. Silver? What does it take to get Gold??!
Basically, I'm saying if you do this not everyone will be happy.
This is my wife. A survivor of over three decades in the corporate world.
(HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206926)
I like this guy. He has great insight, this is very well put :D
I am not even sure if there's a legal definition of shareholder, but assuming that there is, I suspect this doesn't cut it and you are simply a stakeholder instead. Feel free to link to relevant materials, if that's not the case.
In fact every public US stock is owned first by Cede and Company. Any public stock you own is a contract with them (via intermediaries). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cede_and_Company
>So you can be the "beneficial owner" without being the "registed owner".
Are you the 'beneficial owner' of an ETF's invested assets or just of the ETF instead?
You also do not have "direct" access to the dividends. The fund manager will pool the dividends and pay them out on a regular schedule, after taking their cut of fees.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iw8ben#idm140376280574400
I'm sure customer service people and healthcare professionals love people coming on premises and throwing their weight around with exaggerations and half-truths.
The people I know would put you on the bottom of the list.
Note that the cases talked about involve legal deadlines so knowingly delaying to handle them is not a good option.
Are we reading the same thread? The cases talked about are mundane customer service interactions.
My significant other works in consumer facing healthcare. Every day customers come in proclaiming they "know the owner" or "are a lawyer" or "will take their business elsewhere", expecting to be prioritized. This isn't some clever life-hack; the people who do it are, in my opinion, jerks.
The author specifically recommends against grandstanding exactly because it signals "not a professional". So I really don't get your complaint.
It's a warning sign to be ultra-defensive and strictly adhere to protocol (and document every action taken). In any normal situation, there is room for adjustment, but not if you're interacting with someone who seems to have a superiority complex (doesn't mean they actually do, but it seems that way). No one is going to scare me into doing it wrong so I can get reprimanded for it later.
1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...
In electrical engineering you are supposed to say "DIP" which stands for dual inline package, but laymen tend to say "DIP Package" which expands out to "Dual inline package package." In that case, having the wrong words adjacent to the acronym means you don't know what it stands for. That's in contrast to "the NSA" vs. "NSA," where the public (might?) have it right.
No, but Americans seem to do it anyway.
You would definitely work at "the BBC" here.
The point is those acronyms are now used as names in their own right.
As a Hebrew speaker, I wish the "shibboleth" idiom (which is a good one) was translated, rather than transliterated. laoned idioms are inherently exotic, and this one is worth demystifying
It means any choice of word (or pronunciation, in the literal example) that clearly identifies the speaker's group affiliations.
A good modern example is "LondonDerry/Derry. This'd be my my choice for an English translation of shibboleth.
These tweets are about hacking shibboleths, which is advanced mode. Basic mode would be just noticing shibboleths, and also why and how they so clearly identify speakers.
Shiboleths can have serious weight, can be used to disarm/arm. They're probably interesting to text analysis as a classifier. You can use them to reliably imply things about you, like patio does
One hack among many possibles. I'm looking forward to Mackenzie's modern Machiavelli YouTube series using Derries.
- Streichholzschächtelchen (match box – diminutive): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De-Streichholzsch%C3...
- Austrians use a lot of different words, my favorite being Jänner and not Januar for the month January
- Swiss German: Chuchichäschtli (small kitchen cup board) which is hard to pronounce, apparently Arab, Dutch and Hebrew speakers are at an advantage here.: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chuchichaeschtli.ogg
- Another fun thing, different words for bread rolls depending where you are from: http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
Hebrew is well adapted to dealing with words made mostly made from subtle variations of s, sh & t sounds... Which brings us full circle to shibboleth/שיבולת
See https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.12.6?lang=bi for the source.
Netcan is using the standardized Rules for Spelling without vowel pointers (Niqqud) enacted by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which is rejected by some Hebrew language purists.
This is also a British thing: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/food/articles-reports/2018/07/19...
At any rate, that story is often cited, eg in this insightful article that has many more examples:
Mcnamara, T. "21st Century Shibboleth: Language Tests, Identity and Intergroup Conflict " Lang Policy (2005) 4: 351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-005-2886-0
It’s actually hard to do. This is a good choice of shibboleth.
I’d propose “squirrel” as an english word to find german speakers.
Famously, pacific theater allied forces occasionally used “lollapalooza” as a shibboleth, also for fairly obvious reasons.
both ways :)
Learning it theoretically (and adapting to it somewhat) and being able to fluidly pronounce it as a native are two different things...
>and that L1 German speakers that learned Dutch as a foreign language will pronounce “Scheveningen” correctly
Technically correctly. Not natively correctly. There would still be differences...
The idea behind that scheme was not about people "knowing" how to pronounce or not.
The idea was that native speakers would pronounce it differently than people who merely learned the language as foreigners -- which could then be identified even if it was subtle.
Anyways, someone who is Dutch (I'm not) would know how to pronounce it. Someone purporting to be Dutch highly likely would botch it miserably.
A modern example of this sort of shibboleth is:
https://twitter.com/richardfausset/status/861297977813590019
In (I think) 1972, I was a 6-year-old kid, and we went to the town 60 km away (we did not go there very often).
Suddenly, my father exclaimed "Hei yks!" (Finnish for "hello one!") to a man on the street. Then they greeted and spoke quietly for quite a while. I didn't understand it at all.
Only much later I realized that the other man was a brother-in-arms of my father, and "Hei yks!" was the shibboleth of their unit; it had been devised for a night-time attack in very extreme conditions in February 1942, and the men in the brigade then used it throughout the war to identify each other whenever there was no mission-specific one defined. Russians cannot very well pronounce the y in "yks" the way Finns do. (This was of course no strong guarantee because the Soviet army had some native Finnish-speakers, but most were not.)
4 Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” 5 The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” 6 they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
Well, the thing is, I'm not an Englishman so have no idea what's the deal with ‘Derry’ is, but I know what a shibboleth is. It has become an English term—and btw not an idiom in English since it has no other meaning in that language.
I had to look it up too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derry/Londonderry_name_dispute
I just meant that idioms tend to be richer when the source is material.
Point taken on finding an example that everyone understands.
Any political context creates shibboleths by the dozen. The UK is good for making ones that stick around. "Nationist" and "National" political movements, for example, are apposite (and opposing).
Where I'm from, some people, having nothing better to do, occasionally raise noise saying that ‘to each his own’ is offensive because it happened to be written by Nazis on a concentration camp. I don't think I need any more unnecessarily politically aroused stubborn people around than there already are.
It's really only an issue in written form.
In spoken form, the London part is silent so they're both just pronounced Derry..
Signed,
An Irish person.
English is made of Greek and Latin and German and more; it's weird to say that one of those languages is exotic, but weirder still to level that complaint against the oldest known word whose meaning hinges on it being intentionally exotic.
Finally, Londonderry/Derry is a disagreement, not a shibboleth. Shibboleth is about having the ability to pass as a native, not the preference to do so. In modern IT terms, It's something you are, not something you know.
In practice and common language though, the choice of words gives you information about the speaker.
Yeah "shibboleth" carries a really serious (life/death) connotation for me as well. Was confused to see it here like this.
Well, it was neither translated, nor transliterated. It was adopted as an english word, with its own dictionary definition and everything.
The definition happens to coincide with the Hebrew, but it could just as well not (there are loaners that have changed definition).
As far as an English speaking person hears the term, whether they know the meaning or not, it's just any other English word -- they can ask people for its meaning, look it up in the dictionary, etc.
The Hebrew origins don't come into play at all, except when one specifically looks for the history/etymology of the term. But it can totally be used as a black box word too.
English is an incredibly dynamic language with very loose rules. If a loanword sounds exotic, well that's half the fun.
English tends to just copy, at least from other latin-script languages...
Now, one can basically create an infinite number of words in some languages with compound words (eg German) and agglutination (eg Turkic or Uralic languages); it makes sense to exclude those (to avoid counting infinities).
Here's a source (from a collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press) that basically concurs that English is the language with most words (excluding the results of agglutination):
https://www.lexico.com/en/explore/does-english-have-most-wor...
EDIT to add language (family) examples and this:
Here is The Economist with the cop-out answer that it's difficult to count:
https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/06/23/the-biggest-voc...
The definition comes from a story in the Tanach where the word is used. I believe Christians have appropriated this book of the Tanach, too. And this appropriation is what's reflected in English
Until a few decades ago, it was assumed in educated Protestant society that everyone was familiar with the Bible. So a lot of biblical idioms are still present.
I now just realized that the biblical translators must have chosen to transliterate the word, not translate it.
It's probably because in context its about how the word is pronounced, not meaning. In any case, I guess the idiom would have never taken off with the word "corn."
Vulgate, cc 4th century CE:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A5-6...
Luther, 1545:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&v...
King James Bible (1611):
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&v...
Septuagint (the Greek translation, older than all above, around 3rd century BCE) didn't keep that word as is:
https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/shibboleth-in-the-se...
"the LXX scholars had difficulties translating the Hebrew word שבלת Shibboleth into Greek, for the simple reason, Greek lacks the phoneme [ʃ]"
https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.12.6?lang=bi
In Modern Hebrew the term with the modern spelling "שיבולת שועל" is used to mean "Oatmeal"
Yeah. Also using the word "shibboleth" for "advance mode" make some sense, but seems like an uncommon usage. To me, has strong connotations of the "basic mode," i.e. a word use that indirectly gives away someones identity.
The actual medical shibboleth is knowing your dose and dosing interval, total doses over time period X, dose adjustments, that gives doctors the information they need about your drug. Basically just know your history down cold. You'll be forgiven for mispronouncing med names, using the trade or generic name when the other one is more common, etc. Nobody cares. All (yes, all) doctors have a specific framework when it comes to history taking, and it's easy to get. And it's easy to tell when people don't get it. It goes something like, "I (or pt Y) have med problem x, y, z. Recently, I noticed u happening. I tried a, and then b but neither worked." Boom. You're now miles ahead of everyone else seeking care, you're not wasting time while the doc tries to organize and digest everything you're saying, it's that simple.
NYC's electric utility, Con Ed, was giving me a massive run around [0] until I filed a complaint with the New York State utility regulator. After that, Con Ed fixed my problem within a week.
[0]: Long story short, Con Ed installed new electric meters that were supposed to automatically send readings to themselves but they never "provisioned" it (to this day, I don't know what "provisioning" means). But since they had installed those new meters, they stopped sending out meter readers to my apartment building despite the building manager repeatedly making appointments that the meter readers never showed up to. Consequently, my apartment building of ~400 units got estimated bills for three consecutive months.
I always make a habit of specifying the chemical name anyway since certain drugs have different names in different regions. For example, if you were to order Benadryl in the USA, you'd get diphenhydramine, but in the UK, you'd get cetirizine. Also sometimes if you specify the brand name, they'll give you the brand, rather than the generic.
My dad speaks English as a second language and asks my family to proofread things. I have no idea where he got this from, but there was a period of time when he'd write letters addressed to the President of JP Morgan, or, The Comptroller of Maryland, etc. At first we all thought he was just being kooky, but lo and behold these letters were effective for all sorts of issues.
Looking at your name I am going to assume that like me you are from the former USSR.
The explanation my dad said is the following: a lifetime of dealing with soviet bureaucracy informed him that orders always flow down, and each worker tries to prevent complaints from flowing up. Therefore, to get a problem resolved, your request has to come from up high in the bureaucratic hierarchy.
The easiest way to do it? Write to the very top and hope they forward it down with a note saying “fix it”. Then it will get fixed.
Dreamhost's support form used to have a field on how technical are you. The options went something like "I know nothing" to ""not being funny, but I probably know than you".
I know doctors and they are typically very used to people 'knowing' random bits from their googling before they came in, and would rarely act like the patient has an actionable expertise even if they do.
In this example I suspect the doctor would've ended up giving you the option to just call in for antibiotics at some point, regardless of your knowledge of the names of OTC medications.
That's what I thought too, but at the same time I don't doubt the rest of what otakucode described. Being well prepared and honestly interested gets you often a long way. More importantly the expert (the doctor in this case) does - in my experience - almost never care if you are a real doctor, your wife is a doctor, you abandoned med school, etc. All they care is that there is an individual that seems to speak their language and that they can at least try to skip the translation layer and explain the problem in their own language - which I think is relief to them.
Being well prepared and honestly interested instead of trying to leave the impression to be the expert is the key here I think. With that being said I wouldn't advise stressing not being an expert in the field either. This only puts up a barrier and puts the real expert under pressure to switch on the translation layer again.
I can't think of a single situation in which it's a good idea to make it appear as if your medical knowledge is greater than it is. When the conversation shifts to whether your child is allergic to diphenhydramine, you'll wish you had taken a different approach.
Try honesty and interrogative-led questions instead.
It's not spiking in google trends[1], but I wonder if the usage of this word spiking in this community? Or did this twitter user read that article? Or is it just coincidence?
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...
I don't think any Christian denomination does this, so unless you attend a specfic religious school you'll never learn the Christian bible (which includes parts appropriated from the Jews)
Bible study groups are a common Christian thing in many, many churches, for one. Also, it's fairly loaded to suggest that Christians "appropriated" the Old Testament. Perhaps you could choose less divisive language.
Now, knowingly calling it that to a Jew might possibly be interpreted as a form of disrespect, but in my experience most Jews don’t mind at all. It’s a shared scripture, so there’s common ground there regardless of the terms we use.
You’re very mistaken. “Old” in the term “Old Testament” does not mean obsolete and superceded, at least not in the way you mean. To think so would be considered heresy from most mainstream Christian schools of thought.
“Old” and “new” are, with regard to the sections of the Christian bible, temporal designations delineating the law and the prophets that were written before Messiah and the writings that came afterward. But all of it is considered to be the holy word of God.
As any Jew knows, the coming of Messiah heralds major changes in religious life and practice. As Moshe said, “you shall listen to him”. If some believe that has happened, that’s no slight on the former scriptures. In fact, if such a Messiah were to declare them no longer the word of God, any Jew would know and be right to say that such a person is a false messiah.
So there are aspects of the Tanakh that the coming of Messiah causes to be obsolete — like certain temple practices, or the first covenant at Sinai. Jeremiah 31 speaks of a “new covenant” God will make with the house of Israel and Judah. That doesn’t mean the first covenant is no longer God’s word.
It’s like when David gave directions for the construction of the temple and Solomon built it, that didn’t mean Moshe’s directions regarding the tabernacle were no longer God’s holy word — even though there never again was a tabernacle.
I don't know what you're referring to - these claims have no basis in reality.
> appropriated
Christianity did not appropriate the Tanakh. The first Christians were actually Jews (and converts to Judaism), and no gentiles even joined them until about 2 years after Christianity began to spread outward from Jerusalem. The most prominent leaders and evangelists in the early church continued to be Jews for many years after Jesus (who was himself a Jew) -- all 12 of the primary apostles, Paul the apostle, James the leader of the church in Jerusalem (who was actually a half-brother of Jesus), etc. All of these Jewish Christian leaders (including Jesus himself) recognized the Tanakh as scripture, so any subsequent gentile converts were assenting to that designation, not appropriating it for themselves. So in terms of descent, Christianity and modern Judaism have a common ancestor, the pre-Talmud Judaism of first-century Israel. You could just as well say that modern Judaism appropriated the Tanakh--and that statement would be just as absurd.
> modified
Christianity has not modified the Tanakh. Our modern translations use the Masoretic Text as their primary source, with insights from the Septuagint, various targums, the dead sea scrolls, and other early sources -- all of which came from pre-Christian Judaism. The MT itself is attested by hundreds of early copies, so our textual criticism allows for very high accuracy, especially when helped by ancient witnesses like the dead sea scrolls. There is absolutely no basis to your claim.
> replaced
Christianity has not replaced the Tanakh. See my other reply to your comment. It is and always will be God's holy word, to all eternity.
May I add that I say this with deep respect for Judaism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21675729 and marked it off-topic.
I guess the tweeter thinks hes being cool and 'hacking' his interactions with people, but I reckon he's just acting like a weird asshole and people are having to deal with it.
This is just quite funny imo.