Sports Talk Shibboleths
“Shibboleths” is a 25-cent word for 25-cent words that members of various in-groups know and use.
It’s a word with roots in the Bible… and it’s most popular appearance in recent years probably occurred during an episode of The West Wing.
The word is relevant to any listener (or analyst) of sports talk radio, though, since all of the good programs have their own shibboleths. In fact, some of the shows have their own sets of shibboleths — aka vocabularies.
To take two examples:
(1) The Dan Patrick Show actually introduces (would-be) listeners on its website with a page dedicated to the Dan Patrick “dictionary.”
And, more intensely…
(2) The Jim Rome Show probably has the deepest set of idiosyncratic references; in fact, the show is so deeply self-referential that Rome periodically reminds listeners that it’s likely to take a week or two to start appreciating the show (since it takes some time to understand the inside-jokes).
The Rome show’s website upstages by Dan Patrick’s site by dedicating multiple pages to spell out the “Smacktionary.”
Who cares?
Well, we were prompted into thinking about some of this when we recently encouraged friends to listen to Rome’s show and realized that it really is hard to explain without listening for a while… and/or without knowing how to interpret all of the inside-references.
It’s also awkward to listen to a show like Rome’s in the company of uninitiated listeners. And, while we think that’s partly true for any talk-radio show… we trust that it’s especially true for an “insiders” show like Rome’s — with its jungle, clones, smack, ….
P.S. To put it another way, we’d say that “shibboleths” is 25-cent word for “argot,” which is a 10-cent word for “jargon,” which is a 5-cent word for “fancy word that is designed so that relatively few people understand it.”
Tags: Dan Patrick, Jim Rome, Shibboleths
