Environments can affect language—just not how you think
No, the Inuit do not have hundreds of words for snow
EVERYONE KNOWS the Eskimos have dozens, if not hundreds, of words for snow because of their intimate knowledge of their environment. Except that everyone cannot “know” this, because knowledge requires a statement to be true. In fact, the Eskimo snow story is a factoid, a word coined by Norman Mailer for a fun, roughly fact-shaped object that is not, in fact, a fact—in the same way a “spheroid” is not quite a sphere.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “A kind of blue”
From the November 27th 2021 edition
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