The Life Literary

First of all, I’m pretty sure the Eskimo reference is a myth.  I think it’s a misunderstanding that Eskimos have fifty words for snow.  I read recently that their language uses many different word endings to denote tense, mood, number, possibly even use in a sentence (object? subject?).  Somebody misunderstood the endings, mistaking one word in different forms for many words and so, the fifty-Eskimo-words-for-snow myth was born.  Whether it’s true or not really doesn’t matter to me.  I like the idea that people who live in, with, and surrounded by a lot of snow would develop many different words to express the many different forms of the white stuff: fine, powdery, heavy, new, old, wet, and, well, you get the idea.

In my day job we make intensive use of words.  Words, nicely arranged, are our product.  We not only use them, we practice a fine and careful precision in how we use them.  Sometimes, we need to remind people about things for which we’re waiting to hear an answer.  Other times, we are broaching a completely new issue.  At times, we’re actually asking for something, like a piece of information.  The other day, my boss asked me to call so-and-so to engage him on a particular topic.  He was simply saying to discuss the issue with that particular interlocutor though to do it, perhaps, in an artful, nicely put way.  Me being who I am and loving word play as I do, I started listening for the words we use to describe how we interact with others about a particular topic and decided to start a collection.  (Humorously, I checked the list, below, and neither remind nor broach, two words I used earlier in this paragraph, are on the list.  I’m going to add them both.) Continue reading →