Over 100 words for snow?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> At 2/11/2009 12:07 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>>
>>Geoffrey Pullum has shown that this claim is utter bullshit. BTW, are
>>you merely exaggerating for effect WRT "over 100 words"?
>
> No, the source I quoted says "over a hundred".  But it's a (1987)
> book on female felony in colonial Massachusetts, so perhaps the
> author can be excused.  (She uses "snow" among "Eskimos" as an
> analogy to the terms used in Puritan Massachusetts to refer to sexual
> misconduct -- the large number indicates the significance of concern.)

A rhetorical move that has been discussed many, many times on Language
Log, by Geoff Pullum and others. For recent examples of the snow-word
trope, see:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1093
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1087
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=935

And some earlier posts are listed here:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003286.html


--Ben Zimmer

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