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Comment by conistonwater | Hacker News Reader

No it's not! There are tons of places in Shakespeare where he uses wherefore, and that one place in Romeo and Juliet is literally the only usage that's somewhat ambiguous.

> Beatrice: Why, how now, cousin! wherefore sink you down? (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/much_ado/full.html)

When your cousin faints, would anybody ask where they have just fainted?

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"Shibboleth" doesn't mean "mistake", it means "way to check whether someone belongs to a group". "The shibboleth of having taken high school English" means "you can tell if someone took high school English by whether they know/say this". (It also happens that if they know/say this, they are correct.)

I know that. It's still not a shibboleth: on the contrary, the meaning is so clear from the usage (except that one place in Romeo and Juliet), that any fluent speaker will recognize the meaning quickly even if they'd never seen it before. At best, it's a shibboleth for having watched any Shakespeare, but that's not what they meant to say.

There are many places in Shakespeare that are unreadable to a modern-English speaker without explanatory footnotes, but this isn't one of them.

I think you'll find that many, many English-speakers think that Juliet is asking where Romeo is. Thus, knowing that she's asking why he's a Montague indicates that one is not one of those many people — it's a shibboleth for having had a minimally decent education.

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