The Gaming Den

Flipping through channels tonight I came across the film The Golden Child, and I remembered the one thing in the film that always stuck with me: the villain's inablity to pronounce the letter "J", an unavoidable "tell" revealing him to really be a demon in disguise. As a teenage scifi/fantasy fan in the late 80s this made perfect sense to me, but I've never really understood why, and still don't. Anybody familiar with any relatively well-known literary or myth/folklore source for this sort of demonic trait?

Demons in Asian sources have a tendency to use austerities, either on purpose or mandatorily. Basically as they grow in power, they collect more restrictions and do more painful things to themselves in addition to getting more power (in many versions they pick up the restrictions to get the power, and in others they getthe power and the restrictions come with it).

Anything which comes ultimately from the Hindu tradition is all over that stuff. And that means that it shows up in a lot of East Asia through Buddhism.

-Username17

RobK wrote:I remembered the one thing in the film that always stuck with me: the villain's inablity to pronounce the letter "J", an unavoidable "tell" revealing him to really be a demon in disguise.

Someone really liked the word shibboleth.

Maj at [unixtime wrote:1185647716[/unixtime]]Someone really liked the word shibboleth.

Ah, thank you. Can't believe I never heard of that before, must not have sunk in. Always something new to learn. *sigh*