You may have heard that Eskimos have 400 words for snow. "It's just not true," declares Lera Boroditsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1911, anthropologist Franz Boas first pointed out that Eskimos have four unrelated words for the white stuff. Linguist Benjamin Whorf, a student of one of Boas' students, mentioned that there were seven words, and the count has skyrocketed over the decades.

You can stretch the basic list of Eskimo words for snow to about a dozen, but you can do the same for English, what with sleet, hail, powder, slush, flurry, hardpack, blizzard and so forth. Any overflow in the Eskimo snow lexicon arises because the language combines adjectives and nouns into new terms, such as "snow that's been peed on," Boroditsky explains. That doesn't mean that Eskimos have a lot of words for snow. "It just means there are lots of things you can say about snow," she says. --JR Minkel

--