Why was the goal of Cecil’s noble foray into Eskimo bowdlerized to read “Look at all this freaking snow”? I remember the original text quite well, and have often improved a bad day by quoting the current approximation (in English translation) while pushing my snowblower through New England. The regression to “freaking” shows a regrettable failure of nerve, and Cecil is not generally known to lack nerve. Perhaps an editorial minion failed at the moment of truth, and if so, this failure should be corrected.
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! The first version of The Straight Dope on-line was implemented at AOL, and things were bowdlerized there willy-nilly. This website has many columns taken from that era (because who wants to type everything in again?). Sometimes, if you ask real nice, cases of bowdlerization that are caught get fixed, though.
Well, the linguistic myth of the “hundreds of Eskimo words for snow” has been pretty well discredited. However, I can state with confidence that skiers do, in fact, have hundreds of words for snow, in all its many forms and conditions. Here’s a small sampling:
[ul]
[li]avalanche - a large mass of snow falling uncontrollably down a mountainside.[/li][li] black ice - snow so dense, one can see clear through to the ground.[/li][li] boilerplate - snow packed so densely it resembles ice.[/li][li] bottomless - fresh powder so deep skiers need a snorkel to breathe.[/li][li]bulletproof - snow so hard it can withstand a gunshot[/li][li] champagne - super-light, fresh snow that makes skiers want to pop their corks.[/li][li]chowder - broken, chunky powder whose lumpy consistency is reminiscent of a bowl of New England clam soup.[/li][li]corn - loose kernels of snow, usually found during late spring; poor man’s powder.[/li][li] cornice - an overhanging mass of snow good for jumping off and breaking one’s neck.[/li][li] corduroy - barrel-groomed snow that creates a feeling reminiscent of skiing across Paul Bunyan’s pant leg.[/li][li] crud - thick, broken snow especially dreaded by timid, thin-thighed skiers.[/li][li] crust - a hard, icy layer of snow just brittle enough to give way, cutting skier’s shins as they trip and fall.[/li][li] death cookies - nasty ice chips frozen to the snow surface, often left behind grooming machines.[/li][li] duff - loose, light snow, heavier than fluff but lighter than mashed potatoes.[/li][li] dump - a hefty, fresh snowfall, usually of a foot or more.[/li][li] dusting - an immeasurable snowfall, resembling powdered sugar sprinkled on a cookie.[/li][li] fluff - a.k.a. powder; fresh snow with consistency between champagne and chowder.[/li][li] flurry - an all-too-brief, paltry snowfall; a teaser.[/li][li] hardpack - resilient, aged snow, may be called packed powder at Eastern ski areas.[/li][li] kneedeep - fresh fallen, than 6 inches but less than 2 feet deep; a sound often heard from excited powder toads.[/li][li] mashed potatoes - wet, heavy snow so thick a shovel will stand up in it.[/li][li] mogul - snowy bumps; what weak knees are made of.[/li][li] mush - melting snow wetter and usually found in melting ruts.[/li][li] packed powder – ski area term for anything but fresh snow.[/li][li] powder - light, fresh-fallen snow with the fluffy consistency of lemon meringue; the stuff ski dreams are made of.[/li][li] sastrugi - hard, wavy, wind-blown snow, resembling a whitened version of the Sahara Desert, described by Robert Falcon Scott during his expedition to the South Pole.[/li][li] Sierra cement – heavy wet dumpage resulting when Pacific storms reach California’s Sierra Nevada.[/li][li] sleet - airborne slush.[/li][li] slop - melting spring snow intermingled with water puddles.[/li][li] slush - watery snow, more suitable for a 7-Eleven Slurpy than a ski hill.[/li][li] untracked - virgin snowfall not yet attacked by powderhounds.[/li][li] white stuff - colloquialism used by inarticulate TV weathermen.[/li][/ul]
You missed the common-language terms “blizzard”, “drift”, and “flakes”. Less commonly known, there’s also “grauple”, which is snow that falls in small roughly-spherical pellets.
I still want to know how that project is coming on, lo these many years.
I once heard a Danish linguist comment that there are more words for snow in Danish than in Greenlandic.
Bumped for this cartoon: http://arnoldzwicky.s3.amazonaws.com/DiffeeEskimoN.jpg
Everybody remarks on how certain other languages have dozens of words for snow, or yams, but nobody seems to have mentioned that we do this in English too.
In most English-speaking countries, horses are an important part of the culture. And sure enough, we have lots of different words for specific kinds of horses:
[ul][li] foal.[/li][li] colt.[/li][li] filly.[/li][li] stallion.[/li][li] mare.[/li][li] gelding.[/ul][/li]And then there are specific words for horses of specific color patterns (most of which can be used as adjectives or stand-alone as nouns): palomino, bay, pinto, overo, tobiano, etc.
In another culture that doesn’t deal much with horses, they wouldn’t have all these words. If they wanted to talk about a newborn horse, they would just say something like “newly born horse”. If they wanted to talk about a juvenile male horse, they would say something like “young male horse”.
Similarly, we don’t deal that much with yams, so we don’t have a whole vocabulary of every detailed kind of yam. We would use phrases like “yam seedling”, “immature yam”, “ripe yam”, “rotten yam”, while a culture of yam-farmers might well have separate words for all those things.