May 17, 2005

Cartoon in the snow

Ok, three cartoons on usage matters -- split infinitives, dangling participles, and stranded prepositions -- which makes a lot of sense for someone (like me) who's teaching a course entitled "Split infinitives, prepositions at end, and other horrors" (among those other horrors being dangling modifiers).  And now for something moderately different: the Eskimo words for snow, as treated by Bruce Eric Kaplan in The New Yorker of 3/21/05:

For what it's worth, Geoff "Mr. Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" Pullum doesn't think this cartoon is particularly funny.  So the Language Log staff won't be getting him a framed print as a gift.  But some of us laughed.

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 17, 2005 10:39 PM