Of all the places I never expected the Dope to pop up, a footnote in my personality psychology textbook was, you know… one of them.
It was in a footnote after the author (David Funder) had used the old “the eskimos have 4000 words for snow” or whatever as an example of another concept. The footnote reads thusly:
“This long-standing, famous claim stirred a controversy when the linguist Geoffrey Pullum (1991) claimed that the Eskimos do not have a particularly large number of words for snow. In response, Cecil Adams (2001), author of the Chicago newspaper column The Straight Dope, reported that he was able to find ‘a couple of dozen terms for snow, ice and related subjects’ in an Eskimo dictionary and that Eskimo languages are ‘synthetic,’ meaning new words are constructed as the need arises, making it impossible to count how many snow words actually exist” (Funder 132).
The best part is that I went and found the column he cites because I couldn’t believe that Cecil had left out an oxford comma like that, and lo and behold… he didn’t! So I found a Straight Dope citation AND either a typo or a misquote in the SAME DAY!
Whew. Nap time.
Works Cited
Funder, David C. The Personality Puzzle. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010.