Constable: Suburbanites have 1 noun for snow, but many adjectives
We've all heard the story about how Indigenous people of the Arctic and subarctic regions have myriad words for snow.
That idea first surfaced in the "Handbook of American Indian Languages," written in 1911 by German-American linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. He noted that the languages of those people used "aput" to mean snow on the ground, "gana" to mean falling snow, "piqsirpoq" to mean drifting snow, and "qimuqsuq" to refer to a snowdrift.
Suburbanites have multiple adjectives to attach to our singular word "snow" and its annoying clone, "white stuff," as we start out calling it the "fluffy" snow, then "beautiful" snow, then "winter wonderland" snow, then "more" snow, then "still more" snow, then "dirty" snow, then "expletive-load" of snow, then "expletive-expletive" snow, and, finally, "just kill me now" snow.
Boas' writings about his time spent with the Inuit have been the subject of many academic articles, some disputing the "multiple words for snow" claim and some supporting it.
A modern take on that phenomenon surfaced in a research article published in 2016 by Terry Regier and Alexandra Carstensen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Charles Kemp of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Studying language across many platforms, including Twitter, they found that the mention of words for snow and ice appearing in tweets around the globe happened most in Norwegian, and least in Swahili.
They concluded that "language reflects the need for efficient communication," so people who have vast experience with snow and ice have more ways to express that than people who've never even seen snow and ice.
We see this all the time in American life, when people with more experience use multiple words to describe something. For instance, we tend to call the squealing animal with the curly tail that gives us bacon a "pig." But hog farmers might call that same animal a "gilt," a "shoat," a "boar," a "barrow," a "sow," or a "stag." In that same vein, growing up moving bushels of corn with a scoop shovel, I sometimes refer to my snow shovel as a scoop.
People who remember the 1980s can recall a time when "snow" could have meant the white water crystals that fall from the sky during winter, or it could have been just another slang for cocaine alongside "blow," "dust," "flake," "nose candy" or "toot."
After the experience of this February, suburbanites probably do need more words for snow. I've already coined "squath," for the path a squirrel makes through the snow to get to our bird feeders, and "snowcumference" to describe the snow that encircles a car. It would be cool to have a different word for packing snow, heart-attack snow, cross-country skiing snow, powdery snow, frozen snow, pristine snow, filthy snow, the snow you think you can walk across until you suddenly sink in past your knees, and the snow that singer/songwriter Frank Zappa warned us about.
"Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow," Zappa crooned.
Suburbanites don't seem to have a word for lying in the summer grass, staring up at the blue sky and chewing on a clover stem. But snow provides a visual understanding of how many neighborhood dogs use those leaves of grass as a urinal.