Talking Points

You know that thing we all learn in a college linguistics class or from some yahoo sitting next to us on a bus to DC or because it seems to be one of those things that Americans just know by osmosis about how Eskimos have so many words for snow? I am, again, tempted to look this up on Google, exactly how many words for snow the Eskimos have, but am remembering the time I found myself looking up how old Barbra Streisand was when she made Yentl, for no reason any reasonable person could discern, and so again I will stop myself--although I won't promise not to do it tomorrow, after another glorious four hours of sleep. Did you read the Huffington Post piece about how sleep is the real feminist issue these days? If not, do. But back to my story. I know you were riveted: Eskimos. And snow.

No, not riveting, but this morning when I was helping Lily decide which coat to wear, the snow thing popped into my head, and for the first time ever I found myself thinking it didn't necessarily make very much sense. Or rather, that if we were to ascribe anew a word to every possible noun in our own language, there would have to be as many words for each noun as there are Americans (again, tempted: Damn you, Google and your infinite knowledge).

It's late, and even in a land that hands over Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Cosmo centerfold, it's not really a good idea to follow Obama. But do you know what I mean? When I was first explaining to Lily what a dictionary was, I told her that if you wanted to know what a word meant, you could just look it up in this book, and the book would provide you with a definition. "Does it have a picture for the word?" she asked, and I smiled, thinking of all those SAT words: loquacious, indeterminate, obdurate, scintillate. "Not usually," I said, but then--when I scoped out the children's dictionaries at the bookstore--realized that kids' ones do and became perhaps irrationally enraged. If anyone can picture what a cupcake looks like, or a kite, or a carousel, it's a kid, and whatever the kid's version is, it's bound to be better than the dictionary artist's. It's like falling intensely in love with a book and then seeing the movie and thinking: What? That character isn't supposed to look like Matt Damon.

More to the point, if you say cupcake to me, this is what appears in my mind's eye: a white, fairly fine-grained, regular not behemoth sized cupcake in a foil wrapper with a tall swirl of the kind of icing that definitely contains shortening, not butter, and when I say tall, I mean about two-inches, and when I say icing, I mean fluffy but solid enough to hold its shape, pastel-colored, and I wouldn't be adverse to a sprinkle of colored sugar crystals for a little additional crunch. If you say cupcake to a certain friend of mine, this is what appears in his mind's eye; a dense, fudgy, low-to-the-ground little mouthful with a slick glaze of dark chocolate on top. If you say cupcake to Lily, there's no cake at all: she's strictly a frosting gal, a quality I endorse in my children.

So a hundred words for snow, if that's what it is? I guess I'm not actually all that impressed, you seemingly ubiquitous (why are the SAT words coming so fast and so furiously?) linguists, you. Go beyond, deeper than, cupcake, and see what I'm getting at: love, family, mother, peace, happiness, anger, life, death, self, I could keep going forever. Does any word mean what it means to me to anybody else in the world? Not even close. Frankly, I think it's a bit of a miracle most of us find so many people to communicate with. I wonder how often we actually know what each other is saying.