In article ,
Al Patrick wrote:
Mark Zenier wrote:
Oh well, you pushed a pet peeve button. Using meters for band designation
is either pointless nostalgia or a shibboleth, a secret password that
denotes group membership.

Interesting you should bring up shibboleth. For those who don't know
it's in Judges 12, verses 1-6. Seems 42,000 people died that day but
probably not all because they could not say shibboleth. They were
saying sibboleth, leaving out the first h.

It happened more than once in history. During a revolt on Corsica
or Sardinia they had a variant pronunciation for some kind of bean
(vegetable) that got your throat slit if you didn't say it the right way.
"ciciri" or some thing like that.

Mark Zenier Washington State resident