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 th

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.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.h... 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.