Some time ago I went to a party full of people from Manacor with a friend from out of town. A guy who wanted to meet her asked her to repeat “What color is Saint James’ white horse?” This apparently harmless phrase is a shibboleth, a formula that characterizes members of a linguistic group because it repeats a sound unknown to speakers of another language or dialect. Curiously, the word ‘xibòlet’ comes from the Bible, from the book of Judges, in which it is explained how forty-two thousand Ephraimites died for not being able to pronounce like our ‘x’ the initial consonant of the word, which they emitted as an ‘s’, which differentiated them from the rest of the Hebrews.