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Comment by mkmk | Hacker News Reader

> The former prisoner of war and U.S. Navy seaman Doug Hegdahl reports fellow U.S. captives in the Vietnam War would authenticate a new prisoner's U.S. identity by using "Shave and a Haircut" as a shibboleth, tapping the first five notes against a cell wall and waiting for the appropriate response.

With the mass export of western culture, I wonder if there are any songs, tunes, or patterns like this that would still reliably work as a shibboleth.

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A British or Irish person might kick off with an approved weather discussion (appropriate with strangers, for the use of) opening gambit and await a sanctioned response.

Another option is "fork 'andles". The correct response is a repeat followed by childish giggling but the rubbish assumed accents are also part of the shibboleth. This one may be gradually dying out.

A final option is to surreptitiously start a queue.

Pretty sure you could identify anyone who grew up in New Zealand just by saying "Tutira mai nga iwi". You'd either get an almost immediate involuntary response from a kiwi or just confusion from anyone else.

I imagine they would have to be hyper-local at this point. You could authenticate someone from a major metropolis, maybe, but not likely the whole of the US.

I once interviewed a candidate for an engineering position in Seattle. It quickly turned out that he had fabricated his entire work history and education. My first clue was that he claimed two years of work experience at Costco HQ in Issaquah, Washington but he pronounced it as "Is-ACK" (the local pronounciation is "IS-uh-kwah"). No one who spent two years in Issaquah would ever pronounce it that way, regardless of the accent you're coming from. His story just got weirder from there.

[1]: To this day I'm not sure why -- he actually performed quite well on the tech part of the interview and might have gotten an offer if he hadn't turned out to be so untrustworthy!

I'd say the Washington shibboleth should be "Puyallup"

I once met someone who lived in Seattle a couple years and said "Puget Sound" with a hard g

Enumclaw/EnumClaw?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100401-00/?p=14...

I still remember the Mariners commercial from decades ago where Edgar Martinez tries to reach new Latin American recruits to pronounce Puyallup. Hilarious.

Or Snohomish. Or Sequim. Or Cle Elum.

...or Spokane. "Spo-cane" is one I've heard not infrequently.

TIL it's supposed to be "spoh-KAN".

Lake Keechelus

Maybe he had a speech impediment.

The whole of the US would be hard since national level news and culture is what is getting exported, but local knowledge by state/region is a possible source. Like pronunciation of location names pronunciation (like pronunciation of Tilamuk Oregon, Miami Oklahoma, etc.), songs and chants for university sports teams, and jingles and phrases from local commercials.

Rock Chalk...

I enjoy watching recent Seattle arrivals attempt to pronounce Mukilteo, Sequim, and Sekiu.

I grew up in Long Island, New York, and there used to be a radio commercial for a local insurance company that bagged on national competitors for not being able to pronounce Ronkonkoma. Other local place names that were difficult for some to pronounce, mostly indigenous language derived, were Quogue, Patchogue, Cutchogue, Yaphank, Massapequa, Secatogue. If you can rattle those off in 1 or 2 seconds, and still throw in a four letter epithet, you can pass as a local. F'n Quogue.

Louisiana has a long list of place names like this. New Orleans street names alone have standard pronunciations, many of which are not obvious especially if you've seen the name in other contexts. Then there are the city names like Plaquemines, Natchitoches, and even New Orleans itself (if you say "new or-LEENZ" like Chuck Berry you will be immediately flagged as an outsider).

I reminded my wife of Natchitoches every time she complained about pronouncing Massachusetts place names like Leominster when we lived up north.

I grew up in New Orleans and now live in Seattle, and all of my intuition for pronunciation is just totally broken.

In many places, if you see a "weird" (as in non-English-seeming) place name, a reasonable pronunciation guess is to just assume it's from a Romance language and pronounce it vaguely Spanish/French-ish. This works because so many foreign names that are common in the US that aren't obviously Anglo/Germanic are from Spanish, French, or Italian immigrants.

New Orleans screws that all up, though, because it has such a complex intertwined cultural history. In New Orleans, place names often have a pronunciation that is explicitly weirder and sort of the opposite of phonetic. You mentioned "Natchitoches", which is pronounced locally like "Nackodish". There is no reasonable algorithm that would take as input the spelling of a place name in New Orleans and output its pronunciation.

So my usual algorithm for pronouncing an unfamiliar name is, "Guess that it's like a Romance language and if not assume it's completely weird and unrelated to the spelling."

But Native American-derived names in the Pacific Northwest often confound that. They don't have Romance vowels or emphasis at all (for obvious reasons). And the pronunciation often is very close to the spelling. (I assume that's because the spelling came along so much more recently here in the PNW than on the East and Gulf Coast, and hasn't had as much time to drift.)

My dumb algorithm for pronouncing PNW placenames is "Imagine an American who's never even heard of a European country much less visited one, and have them pronounce the name phonetically." And it works surprisingly well!

For example, "Mukilteo". If you try to throw some Romance flair onto it, you'd get "Muh-KILL-tey-o", which isn't right (but does sound charmingly exotic). It's anybody's guess how that would be pronounced if it were a street in New Orleans. Maybe "Mill-toe".

But if you imagine some hopelessly bored midwestern kid forced to read it out loud in school and not even trying to get it right and they'd go, "Muh-kill-TEE-oh" and... that's it.

Likewise, I kept wanting "Anacortez" to sound like some Spanish explorer "Anna CorTEZ". But, no, it's just "Anna-CORE-tiss". "Humptulips" is literally "hump tulips". "Chimacum" is "chim-uh-cum". "Snoqualmie" is "snow-quall-me". They all have the most vanilla-sounding pronunciation.

I admit that Sequim ("skwim") and Puyallup ("pyoo-A-lup") are weird.

> In many places, if you see a "weird" (as in non-English-seeming) place name, a reasonable pronunciation guess is to just assume it's from a Romance language

In New England at least you have three options: English, French (Canadian), or indigenous as mangled by a bunch of half-literate English or French speakers 200 years ago. As a result, it's never quite clear if you're dealing with vowels that went through the Great Vowel Shift that divides middle and modern English[0] or not.

[0] I am not a linguist, cunning or otherwise. This is an approximation.

Oh, I forgot Puyallup, good one. Without the state fair radio commercials I’d be lost. I DID pronounce it as “Muh-KILL-tey-o” on the first day that we moved there 20 years ago, but never again. And Sekiu being pronounced “C Q” seems like it may violate your pronunciation schema. :)

Worcester, which will have the advantage of letting us find any secret British.

The town in Ohio is literally spelled Wooster. I'm not sure what that says about us, but it certainly says something.

That's named for a Revolutionary War general, whose name was Wooster, like 1920s British character Bertie Wooster. There were 169 Wooster families in London in the 1891 UK census. I kind of doubt they all descended from the US, so what this says to me is that some British person filling out a form heard the name "Worcester" and very sensibly wrote Wooster.

Worcester is a corruption of Wigraceaster which is a corruption of Weorgoran Ceaster, so rigidly sticking to an orthodox spelling is ridiculous and it should be reformed. Like Featherstonehaugh turned into Fanshaw.

The pronunciation of Chili, NY is an immediate way to ID anyone from the Rochester area.

...of course it's pronounced "Chye-lie".

I can't talk, though, I come from Ohio where we have a city named "Versailles" that's pronounced "vur-SAYLES".

> ...that's pronounced "vur-SAYLES"

Indiana has one too. I found this out when my wife kept using that pronunciation while touring the namesake French palace on our honeymoon.

Americans love French. It's their nitch. It probably comes from reading so much Nitchski.

Illinois also has a Ver-Say-Lees as well as a Kay-row (Cairo)

Don’t forget Charlotte, NY (pronounced Shar-LOT).

Or Calais, VT is pronounced CAL-iss.

For the US, "where does the shortstop play" is a pretty good one. Some people might get through K-12 without learning that, but surely not many.

I'm an American and the best I could answer for that is "on the baseball field." I know it is a baseball position. Many other countries play baseball too. (Looked it up, oh I remember now, but wouldn't have been able to answer on demand.)

Wikipedia tells me "baseball is considered the most popular sport in parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, particularly in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. "

I don't think there is such a shibboleth with both good precision and recall. American culture is exported around the world, but also is no longer a monoculture with only 3 broadcast networks. Any shibboleth that is ubiquitous enough in the US will be exported globally. Any part of US culture that is not global probably isn't as universal in the US.

Even basic US civics (which would be known by more educated people globally) is far from universal: Only 77% of Americans can link the first amendment to freedom of speech and only 83% can name even one of the three branches of the federal government. And that's of the population of Americans who agree to take a university run political knowledge survey (https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/political-commun...)

Agreed on the general diffusion of knowledge; I think it's probably a step in the right direction for various cultures to have some basic understanding of those with which they are not personally familiar. We Americans shouldn't count on the shortstop being a secret to the world, nor should we be willfully ignorant of things that are popularly known elsewhere.

Shibboleths, like all language, evolve. Some die off, become ineffective or unuseful. Others spring up. Does tiktok live here, now? I fear that I would fail a modern test, but I try to keep up.

During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans infiltrated the American lines with ersatz officers sowing confusion by giving conflicting orders in perfect English.

The GIs hit on the idea of asking them baseball questions. Failing to answer them correctly got the fake officers shot on the spot.

My dad (WW2 vet) told me I would have been shot on the spot. My utter disinterest in baseball distressed him.

American love of baseball is absolutely a trope in WWII films. It was part of a recent "Masters Of The Air" episode where a German interrogator tried to establish rapport with a captured American flier by discussing the most recent World Series. It's like baseball was the only American sport during the 1930s and '40s.

I've been enjoying MotA. My only gripe is the crews laughing, talking and cheering about the target during the briefing. They didn't do that. They were terrified.

I don't give a damn!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_on_First%3F#Sketch

Well, that is who plays short stop.

The position is a different matter.

As if! (the shortstop cares)

Great bit, BTW. I loved it as a kid.

“Not happy…” (“Jan”) would probably work for most Aussies, as one of the most well-known but still local catchphrases.

I heard it in a jpop song, happy summer wedding by morning musume, about 20 years ago. They actually worked it into the melody of the song. I think they're well aware of it now in the East.

Maybe some TV ad jingle. I bet you could do just the rhythm of "give me a BREAK, GIVE me a break, BREAK me off a piece of that" and get three even knocks back as a response.

Football cream?

The Pledge of Allegiance?

Dueling Banjo’s is an equally recognizable call and response.

Nice try ISIS.

Maybe 800-588-2-300?

I don’t know that one. Safari seems to have rendered it as a phone number, though. Which makes me wonder, you could probably use as a challenge: 867-5…

it is a phone number, Empire Carpets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwJQQux0TF0

ive also heard using the question "who was mickey's old girlfriend?" referring to Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

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