"A shibboleth is a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style can be used to differentiate members of ingroups from those of outgroups.
Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say "Shibboleth" (שבלת).' If anyone said, "Sibboleth" (סבלת), because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion.
Today, in American English, a shibboleth also has a wider meaning, referring to any "in-group" word or phrase that can be used to distinguish members of a group from outsiders – even when not used by a hostile other group."
I saw a TV interview with a Vietnam War American POW who said they would tap signals on the wall of cells, and to tell if the person tapping back was a prisoner or a guard, they would tap Shave-and-a-Haircut (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shave_and_a_Haircut ) because the guards just could not get it right. The WP page gives a link to this story.
For anyone not familiar with this reference, there is a scene where a German officer realizes that the other officers he is speaking with are actually Americans in disguise. He notices because the American indicated he would like three drinks with his three middle fingers[0]. Germans typically indicate the number three with their thumb, pointer, and middle finger[1].
Dual wielding a claymore and scimitar, the kevlar armored biped golem paladin sped his humvee at mach 3 onto the the dreadnought powered by a massive solenoid to retrieve the codec which unlocks the secrets of Bolshevism.
Challenge accepted! This one was definitely hard...
With her wild flouncing tresses and flouncy taupe colored taffeta bodice, the young woman made quick work whipping her mascarpone to the delicate tune of the peony, bottlebrush, and wisteria inspired Decoupage Florentine style music box remarkably given her elevated progesterone levels.
Returning from war, the golem picked peonies from the garden of the wisteria-clad, taupe hued home of his lady love whom he spied through a window bedecked in flouncy taffeta tresses below a herringbone bodice while she used a bottlebrush to clean the dishes, her face framed by a collection of decoupages on the back wall, one depicting various mascarpone based desserts, another artfully show-casing the side effects of progesterone based birth control.
This reminds me of a question I once posted on reddit, but never received an answer to: Given that a many jokes are based on peculiarities of a language (puns, but also unexpected uses of certain words), are there jokes that only funny in sign language? If so, what's an example?
Yes. I'm not fluent in sign language myself so I can't explain them very well, but we got several examples of them in my linguistics classes in college.
The most memorable one was a story in which a giant is talking to a small person sitting on his hand and the narrator acts it out. The final word of the joke is a pun... it makes sense in the story, but the sign for it is to clap the hands together (thus, in the story, squishing the small person).
Finally got around to creating an account in order to weigh in on this. My wife took sign language in college and told me that most signs can be repeated back and forth for emphasis. However, the sign for hungry is sort of a vertical cupped hand, like holding a banana in front of your throat, with a downward motion. Repeating this up and down means horny, for reasons that should be clear from the gesture. There is a lot of the visual equivalent of onomatopoeia...
Wow this is interesting! I'm male and knew all of the male words (some thanks to RPG games :)), but only one of the female ones: mascarpone (because I made tiramusu a few times :))
Note: English is not my native language and what I use English for is probably not biased towards the kind of words in the female list.
That was actually the one word out of the male and female lists I wasn't confident about. Probably could have guessed, but wouldn't bet the house on it.
This is funny how this research confirms many of gender stereotypes. Men seem to know mostly war and technology related words while women know more about clothes, textiles and gardening.
They also have a pretty interesting vocabulary test. I wonder how they generated pseudowords. They are really tricky and funny.
Well, a stereotype is not necessarily unfounded. In the region where I come from (around a chemical factory), it wasn't hard do describe populations in a certain town as "chemical workers". You'd probably describe 60% of the population. And a country where only men were allowed into the military for ages also assign and teach those things based on gender.
The problem with stereotypes is that they are a very bad indicators to judge any specific individual now (both because they carry history and bad fit). You might miss important points or assume knowledge that isn't there on a regular basis. Gender stereotypes are especially problematic as they split the whole population into two and assign a lot of attributes purely based on one criterion.
The effects and conditions leading to a certain stereotype are also a fun thing to research.
I would love to have an in-depth conversation about the origins of stereotypes and how they relate to real-world examples, but HN is too politically correct to make an attempt. Which is sad because HN people are generally intelligent enough to pick stereotypes apart without devolving into ugly banter.
> I would love to have an in-depth conversation about the origins of stereotypes and how they relate to real-world examples, but HN is too politically correct to make an attempt.
The problem is the large amount of bad research and evidence that gets thrown around in such a discussion. Tons of biotruth folks come out of the woodwork and there are quite few people who don't argue in good faith whatsoever. That has nothing to do with "politically correct" slant, which HN does NOT have, btw.
To wit: men and women vary wildly in their personalities, and it is very likely this is due far more to different (genetic) sexual selection pressures than it is to socialization and acculturation.
But here's the problem with attempting an "in-depth discussion" on this topic: anyone who attempts to bring facts to a feels fight will always lose. Even on supposedly "rational" HN.
The problem with stereotypes is step 2; what you do with it.
How many of us are habitually making decisions based on large masses of people, rather than individuals? We almost all deal with individuals, one after another (sometimes in small groups), all day long.
In that context, the stereotypes we make even based on research are harmful; if you assume the person you're speaking with won't know what a "humvee" is because she's a woman, you'll be wrong 58% of the time, and she'll be insulted. Plus there's a 22% chance the man next to her won't know the word. ...All of this assuming that you're speaking with a random selection of strangers taken from those who took this online vocab quiz; and how likely is that?
That's why people get so worked up about stereotypes; there may be some original kernel of truth underlying them (some of them), but people who then make assumptions while dealing with individuals do a lot of damage in the world.
Stereotypes are a primitive form of decision heuristics. We must use heuristics when dealing with the enormous volume of information that we are required to process on a day to day basis, or we would never get anything done as we evaluate every micro-decision at an atomistic level.
As far as missing out on great opportunities by using heuristics, it happens all the time, and not just with race/sex/age stereotypes. It happens with food, it happens with color, it happens with sounds and temperatures and fabrics and pets. We require heuristics based on generalizations and abstractions to even function in the world.
There is no easy solution to this, but the saving grace of a semi-free society is that if your particular heuristic excludes a great opportunity, it's very likely someone else's heuristic does not.
That might sound a bit surprising, but I found that feminist groups can be very pragmatic about this. Meet up in person, make sure there is no one trolling the discussion and that goes very well.
The problem with public discussion is that people don't want to give open flanks for troll arguments.
I would probably have mutiple competing nonsense generators, which could then be ranked based on how well they could fool native speakers.
I thought I could detect one that compounded valid English words into a nonsense word, one that added English prefixes and suffixes to nonsense roots, one that created scientific sounding technobabble, and a Markov chain for digraphs.
More like the stereotypes are self-reinforcing via society, and this result (research is too strong a word) just reflects the cultural expectation ⇄ stereotype feedback loop.
The HN title is misleading. These are words with a large-ish difference between how many men and women know them, but there is rightfully no "only" in the original title. "codec" is the only word know by less than 50% of women (48%). Similarly, there's only one word know by less than 50% of men, "taffeta". In both, the bottom of the 12 words has a difference of 25%-points.
The "men words" seem to be videogames and war stuff (except codec which, dare I suggest, is an online porn word). Women words are in the fields of decoration, fashion and flowers.
Codec is a porn word???? it would have taken you longer to write that comment that look it up the right answer.
Codec are how your video and audio is encoded over the internet but I enjoy that you defaulted to a male word must be about porn. Flac/G711/g729/h323 are codec's (audio), infact here is a list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs
I was going to explain to you why boys and girls focus on different words. Its to do with world perceptive that is shaped in early childhood but I really cannot be assed to start a chatter with someone that makes pointless observations, and then proceeds to make random comments based of their interruption of basic internet terminology without even looking something up.
I think mseebach means that men people are probably exposed to the word due to the need to watch porn videos and thus learn about codecs, not that it's a word exclusive to porn.
I don't think it's about porn, though, I find the torrented movies explanation more plausible.
That's an unfairly presumptuous and aggressive comment. Give the writer some credit maybe?
"Codec are how your video ... is encoded over the internet"
And video is a format commonly used for pornography, right? Is it so unlikely that someone might have encountered codec issues browsing adult videos online?
Yes. We changed it. (Submitted title was: "Words known only by men or women")
Submitters: as the HN guidelines ask, please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. Please don't rewrite a title to make it more misleading.
You're probably more likely to get familiar with the term "codec" trying to get torrented videos playing in various media players than anything to do with porn.
It lies somewhere along the spectrum between cream cheese and creme fraiche. It's basically the best thing ever invented to put inside of a dessert crepe, though it has many other suitable uses, of course.
I "know" most words on both. That is to say, I know that a solenoid is a kind of switch (a common failure point in the ignitions of 1960s cars), and I know that "taffeta" is a kind of fabric. But if you sent me into an auto parts store with the labels in an script I don't know (Chinese, Arabic, etc.) my chances of coming out with a solenoid would be not much better than my chances of getting taffeta in a fabric store so labeled. Likewise "paladin" fits somewhere in a medieval warfare context, but can I define it? I think that Roland and Oliver might have been paladins.
The good news is that I can identify wisteria for several weeks every year...
Actually, a solenoid is just a coil [1], which in electronics can be used to turn a current into a magnetic field. It is used to implement switches, but has other applications as well. For example, the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) [2] experiment uses theirs to generate a strong magnetic field to bend the tracks high-energy charged particles.
Context matters... ask most auto buffs, or the clerk behind the counter at Advance Auto Parts, what a "solenoid" is and they'll tell you (rightly) that it's a relay that controls the high-current circuit between the battery and the starter, using the low current circuit through the ignition switch.
Yeah, and they're not very common words no matter what your gender. I can't imagine most men bring up the word "dreadnought" in casual conversation, and "wisteria" probably only gets mentioned (if you're not a florist) in the context of Desperate Housewives.
The words "not known" by the other gender seem to still be known by 50-60% of the gender that allegedly doesn't know them. I don't know that that is a really useful test.
I found the vocab test itself [1] quite interesting, but without information about the distribution of scores it's difficult to interpret the "% words known" metric.
Is the distribution of scores publicly available anywhere?
All the words I did not recognize were either absolutely British regional slang or they had one or more synonyms that are overwhelmingly more common in the US.
Examples: juggins, freeview, jackfish, redbrick
The US equivalents would be bumpkin, superstation (?), northerns, and ivy (as in Ivy League).
I sort of assumed that the nonsense word generator would make nonsense compounds from valid English words, which is why I rejected those last 3, despite that nagging feeling that they were so simple that someone, somewhere might have used them.
I saw that when I clicked the "what does it mean" link at the end. I recall thinking that trademarks are not, strictly speaking, English words. That would be like saying "microsoft" is a word, because "Microsoft" is a company. That's why researchers in this vein have to review their source dictionaries, and scrub out all the things that met the lexicographers criteria but not the researchers'.
But maybe that is what they are doing. The test was on whether the viewer recognized the string as a word. The comparison at the end was probably just what can be found in the latest revision of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. They might be using the results to assemble a word corpus that could be used in other research applications. If that's the case, bravo for not requiring a bunch of research assistants to endlessly pore over word lists.
You're so afraid of the word "darkie" that you refuse to acknowledge (to an anonymous computer algorithm) that you recognize the word and close the window, yet you come to HN and tell the story using your real name?
Given how the test was administered - it was a yes/no "do you know this word" test with some fake words mixed in to discourage people from saying yes to words they don't know - "know" is a bit of a stretch here - "recognize as a word" is probably the better description of these percentages. I don't think the results are all that meaningful because none of these words are used much - most of them are used only in contexts that already imply an uneven gender ratio. On the other hand, there are probably a lot of common words used in casual contexts that are recognized by virtually everyone whose usage is significantly skewed by gender - those are probably much useful for identifying gender.
For me, if I had to actually define some of these words, it would skew even more by gender, depending on what you mean by "define". For example, I know that a peony is a flower, but I wouldn't be able to draw you one, nor would I be able to identify it other than by process of elimination. Similarly I know that "taupe" is a color, but I don't really know which color (I mean, obviously these are now bad examples because I look thinks up when I don't know them, but the point is still relevant).
I'm not that surprised that many of the "female" words have to do with clothing that only women wear. Men don't tend to wear anything all that elaborate, and often it's unisex anyway. It's possible that that's an artifact of the fact that women tend to be more interested in fashion than men, though - I guess I don't really know the difference between Oxfords and boat shoes, so maybe the fact that there's no comparable set of fashion terms for men is because even men don't know the terms for the clothes they might wear.
That data would be easier to get by finding text written by men or women and finding words that correlate with gender. Finding words that we recognize but don't use regularly is harder and requires a test like this.
I remember some research doing this on twitter data:
>the more obvious results pointed out that women will normally tend to use emotional language like “sad, love, glad, sick, proud, happy, scared, annoyed, excited, and jealous.” Emoticons, and CMC (computer-mediated communication) terms (lol, omg, brb, for instance) are female markers, “as [are] ellipses, expressive lengthening (e.g., coooooool), exclamation marks, question marks, and backchannel sounds like ah, hmmm, ugh, and grr.”
>Clear male markers include words related to swearing, technology, and sports, and in relation, numbers (as in scores).
The vocab test is "do you know this word?". It doesn't ask you to demonstrate that you know the word. So in reality this is words people claim to know, or have heard before, not words people actually know the definition for and can use in a sentence.
But they do counter with real-looking non-words, and you're penalized heavily for claiming to "know" one of the non-words, so that helps the accuracy of the test.
You can take the test on the site to try it -- here are some of the non-words I hit that looked real-ish (though I still clicked "no"):
Unfortunately fluoxetine would have been an easy one for me. I got the word korfball (Dutch sport similar to basketball), which is interesting because I marked that I spoke dutch as a second language. I wonder if that was thrown in to determine if I truly knew dutch or not. It also could have been in there because the study is being done by the University of Ghent, and Belgium is really the only other country where Korfball is popular.
As she leaned to his splaits, he looked into her mangean eyes. She started breathing rebrenningly. He slowly removed postocks from her legs. "Unzip my struffhold," she whispered into his ear.
I did not see that. That definitely helps accuracy, but doesn't eliminate the words that you have heard, but don't know the meaning or usage. I guess for a simple internet test and analysis it is probably good enough.
"rebuital" tripped me up. I read it as "rebuttal", and indicated that I knew it. Had I taken more time to read the word carefully, I would have indicated that I did not know it.
I have a podcast where we talked about this article, and we, both of us men, did know very few of the "female" words. It seems like almost all of those words were from one of two semantic fields though, so if this list tells us anything of value at all, it's that if women want to keep secrets from men en masse, they should put them in the floristry/fashion industries.
Ahem... Some days ago I went to a live show and the actor started to interact with the public. At some point he asked women to raise the hand if they knew the meaning of "bukake". Almost no women raise her hand.
When it was men's turn, most did, and probably some who didn't raise his hand knew it too, but were ashamed to admit it in front of their girl friends of wifes(this could be the case for some women, too).
If you don't what it means, don't search for it at work.
So, I bet that's a way more discriminative word that any of that list.
Edit: the "live show" was just a monologue show, in case you were wondering.
This sort of thing comes up if you play Cards Against Humanity and end up having to explain bukkake, gloryhole and so on to a mixed group of people who didn't previously think of you as perverted.
It surprises me the word 'biped' being there. What's the reason behind men knowing this word way more than woman? I fail to find a stereotype answer for this (unlinke kevlar or taffeta)...
It'd be interesting to have this broken down by age. While biology and medicine have historically been mostly men, in many places they're about 50-50 in the last couple of decades.
It's not a word people use in normal conversation, only really science or philosophy (Plato's "featherless biped"). Which are stereotypically masculine pursuits, I guess?
More men might be familiar with bipods (e.g., affixed to a rifle), or monopods and tripods (from the male-dominated photography hobby), or even gastropods or pedals...
Also, could be a lot of males familiar with the LOTR series, and mistaking golem for the character gollum. Easy mistake to make if you didn't read the books.
I saw it before on Marginal Revolution or somewhere and was impressed with its accuracy. I'm a guy and English is my second language. I knew all the words on the first list, and one from the second.
Taking the test, I didn't claim to know any of the fake words, but because of their disclaimer about that, I'm pretty sure I took the safe "no" answer to a few words that I seemed to recognize but wasn't positive about. So my score could have been higher than the 70% I got.
But it's an interesting test overall, and I can see where being a well-read individual, a writer, or an English professor could achieve high percentages in "male" and "female" vocabulary.
I get the feeling these are "internet" or "computer nerd" words. Many of the male words I know are all from videogames. Where else would I interact with dreadnaughts (Red Alert) or claymores (Final Fantasy)? :-)
My guess is that the respondents were self-selected internet dwellers. Looking at their polling criteria, (an online test?) looks like it may well be the case.
Apart from the fact that both of these words pre-date the Internet and/or computer nerds. The word dreadnaught is a neologistic spelling of dreadnought; which is a portmanteau contraction of the phrase "fear God, and dread nought". The first historical use as the name of a naval vessel is HMS Dreadnought (1553). The word claymore is another very old word, 14th vs 15th century. It comes from Scots Gaelic and literally means "great sword". Since both words are terms for two weapons of war it probably is more likely to be known by men.
I got 66%... though I wasn't sure if I had to "know it was a word" or "know what the word meant". I didn't say yes to a fake word... but I said no to several that I knew were english words, but was unclear as to their meaning.
I got 84% (none of the fakes, like you). Had a fair idea as to the rough meaning of all at worst, but a few I wouldn't have been keen to define in public and a gun to my head! Fun little test.
Not sure if anyone pointed this out here before, but asking for a participant's gender in a questionnaire before any of the questions are actually asked skews the results. It's got to do with stereotype threat and is scientifically proven.
Their test just asks users if they know the word as opposed to actually testing if they do. So it's percentages are inflated, which may mess up the proportions as well.
Great bit of research but what are the criteria for knowing the word? I doubt many western men actually know what a bolshevik is. Is this selfcertified or multiple choice?
The criterion is distinguishing words from non-words. That's it. You don't have to know the meaning. You just have to distinguish it from a word-like series of letters. If you incorrectly identify a non-word as a word, your score is penalized in some way.
I was surprised to find Bolshevik in the list of little known words. I learned about it in secondary school during classes on Russia history (live in France) and everyone is supposed to know his Lenin from its Trotsky. Although we spell it « Bolchéviques ».
I was surprised it was on the list, but for the opposite reason. The others could be excused as technical or niche vocabulary, but bolshevism was critical to the third-most influential (for English speakers) historical event of the 20th century.
I knew all from both lists, oddly with about the same level of certainty -- e.g., each list had 1-2 words I've probably never spoken before, and am fuzzy about the definition (decoupage I recognize as French more than English, and don't know the domain; I can't identify a peony though I know it's a flower and have used the word; a solenoid is a little electronic -- what, switch?, a dreadnought is an acoustic guitar shape plus some kind of war boat I wouldn't be able to identify).
Most I know well, though -- I have a bottlebrush at home, and I clean bottles with it. My neighbor's house is almost consumed by an enormous wisteria vine (so I know it's "glissine" in French, and my French vocab is pretty limited!).
I suspect a lot of this is a function of age -- as you get older, you come into contact with more vocabulary naturally. I started fixing up my house and that came with a slew of vocab. Having a child did the same; ditto working with medical data for work.
Or if you read widely, you accelerate the process massively, because vicarious lives are rather faster than real ones. I'm less of a bookworm these days, but I did little else for chunks of my life.
I got all of the male words, and 10 of the female words (I'm male). I love to read both fiction and non-fiction, and I'm fond of writing, so I'll see a word and form a picture in my mind even before a definition forms.
For example, with "mascarpone" I picture all of the ingredients for making tiramisu, which I've prepared a few times in my life. With "claymore" I picture a Scot brandishing a sword as large as he is, even though it can also refer to a modern military weapon.
"A shibboleth is a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style can be used to differentiate members of ingroups from those of outgroups.
Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say "Shibboleth" (שבלת).' If anyone said, "Sibboleth" (סבלת), because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion.
Today, in American English, a shibboleth also has a wider meaning, referring to any "in-group" word or phrase that can be used to distinguish members of a group from outsiders – even when not used by a hostile other group."