‘Cross the Border

I’ve heard that Eskimos have fifty words for snow. I’ve also heard that they don’t. Since I have no Eskimo friends to ask about this important point, I will do what I always do and choose the statement that appeals to me the most and wait for clarification of the matter sometime in the future.

What prompted this flight of ideas was watching the frozen moisture that fell from the sky on two successive days this week. First there was Tuesday, which featured those large and very beautiful flakes that one could watch falling in slow motion for hours. A beautiful happening, the meteorological equivalent of lyric poetry. On Wednesday the snow was very small and granular, looking for all the world like someone up there was sifting white flour onto the world.

Now if my vocabulary was richer, perhaps I could have used a single word to describe what was happening each time. After all, life is indeed short, and saving a second or two here and there couldn’t be anything but good for a person, could it? Why, in the area of calisthenic exercising, for instance … five or six seconds are all I need for a typical day’s session.

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From The New Yorker

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While I’m on the subject of words and weather-related items, let me congratulate the man or woman who came up with the phrase polar vortex. It doesn’t of itself really tell you what is happening to you, but it certainly sounds like it is important. It seems to have largely replaced the cold-weather language that was used when I was growing up in the Midwest. All of those phrases back then had the word “Canadian” in them. This was a very useful practice, in that we knew both that we were going to be miserable and exactly who we had to blame for it.

I have always thought of the situation I’ve just described as Canada’s loss and America’s gain, but I am open to the interpretation that the reverse might have been considered true by the respective governments at the time.

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