How Many Words Do the Inuit Have for Snow?
Seems there have been some myths spread about this. “The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup’ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow — the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax).” (From Language Hat) (discuss) Cloak and Gown I just stumbled across this article about how the CIA was influenced by literary scholarship. “Mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton, the most controversial figure in CIA history, began his career as an apprentice of the New Critics on Yale’s English faculty, and his literary training in ‘close reading’ may have shaped his hyper-skeptical (some would say paranoid
