Only 17 words for snow
I'm not sure what the current record is for Eskimo N, the number of
words the Eskimos are claimed to have for snow, but this Sunday's
New York Times Book Review yielded
an unusually modest Eskimo N, 17.
From Christopher Buckley's review (p. 18) of Chris Miller's
The Real Animal House: The Awesomely
Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie, on the
vocabulary of the members of Alpha Delta Phi at Dartmouth in the
early 1960's:
There are... a few relatively innocent
terms, like the synonyms for breasts: "jehoshaphats," "baboos,"
"wazookies," "ka-hogas" and of course "gabongas." The Inuit
language contains -- what? -- 17 different words for "snow"? The
AD's must have twice that many for "vomit."
Buckley has obviously pulled the number 17 out of his, um, hat.
This number is what you're likely to come up with when you're asked to
pick a random number: it's the smallest prime number without any
special cultural significance. The numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, and 13 are
clearly special; 11 is not quite so special, though it is the number of
players on a football team (American or Association), and then you're up to 17.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 9, 2006 10:01 AM