How to avoid book club shaming: a cheat sheet

Today, thankfully, the stakes of the shibboleth—the term gets its name from the Biblical story—tend not to involve such horrific matters of life and death. On the contrary, they tend to involve matters that don't much matter at all. To a large extent, modern-day shibboleths are status signifiers, the kind of loaded terms that reveal their utterers to be on a single side of a stubbornly binary line. They are not mistakes ("noo-cular" instead of "nuclear," "mis-chee-vee-ous" instead of "mischievous") so much as they are keys: They afford a kind of aural entry into arbitrary echelons. You know you've made it, for better or for worse, when you know that it's pronounced pee-kuh-TEE. 

I mention all that because the Tumblr 454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011—2157 has an extensive—and revealing (and occasionally, I'll admit, helpful)—list of "shibboleth words": words “by which,” the post accurately notes, “the privileged judge their inferiors.” The list consists mostly of names, most of which, in turn, belong to a Pikettyesque cadre of intellectual celebrities.