catchword

catchword, byword, shibboleth, slogan mean a phrase that catches the eye or the ear and is repeated so often that it becomes a formula.

Catchword usually applies to a phrase that serves as the formula or identification mark of an emotionally charged subject (as a school of thought, a political party, or a cause) and that is often used by those who have only a superficial knowledge of the subject and its philosophy and basic tenets

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"the new deal" became the catchword of supporters and critics of Franklin Roosevelt as "the square deal" was that of the friends and the enemies of Theodore Roosevelt

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man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords— Stevenson

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these catchwords which you repeat when people ask you for intelligence— Masefield

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Byword sometimes denotes a significant phrase that is repeated far and wide until it has become a proverb

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the old byword of necessity being the mother of invention— Kroeber

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The more usual sense is a person or thing that has become proverbial as the type of certain evil, ludicrous, or shameful characteristics and whose name, therefore, has become the object of concentrated scorn or contempt

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I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people— Wilde

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even those public departments that were bywords for incompetence and red tape were far more efficient than the commercial adventurers who derided them— Shaw

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Emerson . . . was still an impossible puzzle in the popular mind, even a national joke, a byword of the country paragraphers— Brooks

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Shibboleth was the word which, in Judges 12, the Ephraimites fleeing from the Gileadites could not correctly pronounce when tested, thus giving away their identity to Jephthah as his enemies; it typically applies to a fixed usage (as a word, phrase, or speech sound) whose employment identifies a person as belonging to a particular party, class, profession, ethnic group, or time. The term basically stresses help in placing a person

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a child who . . . has not yet learned sufficiently well the phonemic shibboleths, the arbitrary sound-gamuts, which his society insists upon— La Barre

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our listeners type us—stereotype us— according to the impression they gain from our verbal habits . . . every word we speak is a shibboleth— G. A. Miller

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but may also imply the emptiness and triteness of such usage and then approach platitude in meaning

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some truth in the shibboleth that crime does not pay— Rogow

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Slogan, originally a cry used in battle, has come to mean a phrase that is a shibboleth of the party or group using it

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that was in fact the position that the Dadaists took up. "Art is a private matter: the artist does it for himself' was one of their slogans— Day Lewis

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It may be a phrase deliberately invented for the sake of attracting attention to a party or group

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a slogan ... is a short message designed to be repeated over and over again, word for word— Kleppner

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traditional schoolbook platitudes and campaign slogans— Frankfurter

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or it may be an eyecatching or ear-catching bit used as an advertising device

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the Heinz "57 Varieties" label. . . provided the company with both a trademark and an advertising slogan— Current Biog.

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Analogous words: caption, legend (see INSCRIPTION): *phrase, expression, idiom: *commonplace, platitude, truism, bromide, cliché