
The snow words myth: progress at last (2007) - ColinWright
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004003.html
======
adamtj
This article was only mildly interesting to me. I think there is a better
story tangential to it.

The article is only mildly interesting because it gets at the truth behind the
idea that Eskimos have 40 different words for snow. If I didn't know that, it
would have been very interesting. But, of course, that common wisdom is wrong.
I would be surprised if there's anybody who doesn't at least suspect that's
the case. The truth is never as clean and perfect as the stories we tell,
which makes it more boring. But, the truth is much more powerful. That power
is exciting. I'll always chose to take the boring but powerful truth, even if
it ruins the fun story for me. I do, however, have a passing interest in
linguistics, so it was nice to learn something about the Eskimo language
family.

However, there's an obvious tangent to this article that I think is more
interesting and more powerful: I figured this article would be about
snowclones, or at least mention them. It's not and it didn't.

"Snowclone" is a really interesting word that was coined only a decade ago.
You could say that it names an idea that was recently discovered: that many
phrases are specific instances of some clichéd template. The phrase isn't the
cliché and may even be unique. Rather, it's the template that's familiar.

For example, "If Eskimos have 40 words for 'snow', politicians surely have
dozens of words for 'lie'." More generally, "If Eskimos have N words for snow,
X surely have Y words for Z." Also, "X is the new black", or even "X is the
new Y". It's a name for a phrase that's a clone of that one about Eskimo words
for snow. Hence, snowclone.

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone)

Of course, this idea was known to people long before "snowclone" was coined.
When I say the idea was recently "discovered", I mean that in somewhat the
same sense that, after the Age of Discovery opened the globe to them, Western
naturalists "discovered" and named many animals and plants that were well
known to indigenous peoples and had even been seen by previous western
explorers. Still, the West didn't come to know those animals until somebody
recognized them as new and gave them a good name. Ok, maybe this analogy is
stretched. Still...

To simply encounter something doesn't mean we recognize it for what it is, or
that we can distinguish it from other similar things. We need names for that.

I think good names are more important than we generally give them credit for.
A good name is like a handle on an axe-head. Hand axes have a long history and
are among the first tools that humans made. Attaching a handle to one gives
much more leverage, which makes chopping easier and more efficient. A handle
even enables the use of a heavier, more powerful axe head. Good names
similarly make ideas both more powerful and at the same time easier to work
with than they were before they were named.

