According to they (as in: “they say”), there are 52 different words for snow in the Inuktitut language. Always, “they” trot out this fact as evidence for a linguistic observation that we tend to develop our vocabulary according to our need. If we are Inuit, snow is important to our lives and so we develop a more nuanced account of snow.
If, on the other hand, we live in Toronto, where urbanization has changed the local climate into an urban heat island, snow doesn’t really dominate our lives anymore. People outside Toronto tend to think our vocabulary has developed more nuance in describing financial instruments and ways to flip real estate investments. As for snow, if the temperature is below freezing, we call it fucking snow. If the temperature is above freezing, we call it fucking slush. That’s about as far as our vocabulary goes.
As for the 52 different Inuktitut words, it turns out “they” were just making shit up. In fact, there are only a dozen Inuktitut words for snow and another ten for ice. For example, qinu is the word for “slushy ice by the sea” and fucking qinu is the word for “fucking slushy ice by the sea.”
