Book Review: Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg

By Katy Kelleher
It's an often-repeated fallacy that the Eskimos have one hundred words for snow. While they do have many ways of describing the weather, each name for precipitation means something specific—they have terms for the slushy mess that coats your boots with every step you take, and words for the light, airy snow that flirts with the wind before coming down to earth slowly. There are other words for thick wet snowflakes and dry, frigid droplets.
Linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas popularized this incorrect, yet rather poetic, idea. He believed that this was indicative of a certa...