It snowed some this morning... enough to make a walk with Anya and a friend around St Anthony Park an adventure in hidden ice. More slippery adventures driving during the day, sliding into parking spaces near Lake Harriet. Funny how some light snowfalls can slick up the road like crazy, while some heavier snows just leave pretty drivable slush. It's a kind of dance, layers of ice and snow, compacted or loose, wet or dry.
It's a myth that Inuit languages have hundreds of words for snow, or really more words for snow than English does (flurry, blizzard, slush, drift, powder... not to mention all the adjectives that can characterize snow: light, heavy, wet, dry, granular, compacted...). The Saami (Lapps), on the other hand...
But why does a variety of words mean we think something is more important to discuss? It doesn't. "Love" and "God" and "war" are all topics of endless discussion, without lots and lots of words for them. Reproductive organs, on the other hand, carry a seemingly infinite number of terms in slang. Which are more important in our culture? Never mind. Don't answer that one.
What a variety of terminology, in the case of weather anyway, is indicative of, is how important it is to characterize it by type. In the case of love and God, the focus tends to be on equating different forms, and on approaching a singular ideal out of a mass of experience. With weather, we want to know the difference in effect between a scirocco and a chinook, or between an F1 and F2 tornado. Why? So we can respond most appropriately and keep ourselves safe and healthy.
In the case of snow, what I in my house and car want to know is: what will driving or walking in it be like, and how hard will it be to shovel. Icy, powdery, or slushy on one hand. Dry or wet in the other. Really, for driving what I want to know is not the nature of the snow, but of the road surface: how slippery is it,and what kind of ice is forming: packed-snow slipperyiness, black ice (formed from frozen water vapor from vehicle exhaust, rutted ice, ice under snow or snow under ice... you don't actually need a lot of different words, you just need to be able to arrange them in order to describe what's going on out there.
Or maybe you just like having lots of words for snow.
50 Words For Snow - Kate Bush with Stephen Fry from John Vallis on Vimeo.
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