Category: History

You’ve all heard about this, right? Eskimos (okay, actually the Inuit) are so intimately familiar with snow that they have up to 400 different words to describe it.


Right.


Having talked to parents of infant twins and to those that have had little tykes in the house for over ten years I think I can safely call this one a myth. They’ve seen more different kinds of poop than most Inuit see different kinds of snow in a lifetime and yet they’re able to classify it with at most a couple dozen terms – including the profane ones. (This is not, mind you, a challenge for you to list all the four letter words that you can think of.)


Dave Mendosa has a short piece about this on his website and he covers how the myth got started – when an explorer visited the area and claimed that the tribe had four names for snow.


Four?


Stephen Pinker - a prominent linguist – suggests that today the Inuit have only a dozen words for snow, and that is if you count generously. And here you can find a list of snow morphemes (note that there aren’t many more in Inuit than there are in English.)


Most on the Internet seem to conclude this is a case of gradual exaggeration – each person repeating the story adds a percentage or two as they retell it.


So why am I (as a Thingnamer) bringing up this linguistic fallacy? Because in a few ways it parallels issues we face in naming things. But I’ve only got time to address one today, so here it goes…


Let’s address the possibility that we could build 400 words meaning essentially the same thing. Oddly this doesn’t get my hackles raised. When we develop new names for products or companies we may consider thousands of potential names on our team before weeding them down to a select group to pass on to the client. In effect, before we deliver our prime candidates we live through the hell of trying to identify the same individual thing with a virtual Babel of morphemes and other lexical bits.


How do I know that there can’t be 400 terms for “snow?” Because early on in my Thingnaming life I used to deliver all of the naming candidates to the client to sift through. They’d be given hundreds or thousands of candidates to consider instead of dozens.


Know what happened? Almost nothing. With so many options to choose from my clients were unable to even begin to evaluate the terms for fit. They were overwhelmed. When trying to compare one candidate to the mass of others there was too much to evaluate. Discussion was perpetually focused on how the client could possibly know if a name were better than every other candidate – even when we tried to narrow things down to an either-or decision.


I think this parallels what would happen in real life. Imagine if you had to go through this process just to describe what was falling from the sky. Was it snow54 that was falling around you, or perhaps snow323? Does snow313′s aspect of supreme fluffiness better fit the situation than does snow299′s reference to the slowness with which it falls?


A quick side note: My personal feeling is that inventing so many words for snow is impractical if we can take existing terms (adjectives, mostly) and connect them with the core term. Consider “driven snow,” “wet snow,” and “dense snow.” If we make every single possible quality of snow into its own unique term then we lose the ability to compare the particular quality of that snow to other items without relying on metaphor.


Second side note: There are some things that have 400 different words to describe them, but they’re not used in conversation by laypeople. Consider the color green – when you look through paint chips you’ll find hundreds of different words to describe slight variations in the presentation of color. Is it “Pinesage” or “Forest Growth?” The names, however, aren’t meant to be used in every day life. They’re mostly just to give people a way to refer to the color while holding it in their hand and comparing it to another color. It’s just easier to understand than “this green” or “that green.” (Yes, I know that the greens in question are actually different greens – but I’d assume that this argument holds for snow as well – the hypothetical different words for snow are pointing out that the snow itself is not the same in each case.)


I guess that technically speaking those previous two paragraphs weren’t side notes since they were actually at the end of my meandering post. Perhaps we can come up with 399 terms that better fit their true purpose?


Tate Linden
Principal Consultant
Stokefire Consulting Group
703-778-9925