names

Eskimos have seven, or forty, or a thousand words for snow. We learn this early in life from overeager linguists. Later, we will learn that this knowledge is both true and also entirely without merit. In the polysynthetic Eskimo languages, words are created as the aggregation of whole phrases; adjectives and nouns and verbs can be mashed together into a single name. It is true that there are words for wet snow and packed snow, and for the snow molded under the paws of a wolf. But there are also words for solitary situations so specific as to be meaningless: the snow melting on a bright red T-shirt, writes one German author, also has its own name which might never be pronounced again in the whole long history of our world.

There is a name, then, for the water frozen onto the wings of a plane. Perhaps there is another for the snow clinging so tightly to concrete barriers that we mistake it at first for a salt stain. There is a word for the sludge that gathers at the edges of sidewalks and melts into the dirty brown puddles in the crossings that soak the fringes of our jeans. There is a name for the snow that sneaks down under my collar, that falls cold onto my back or flutters over my shoulder and catches in her lashes, the snow that she brushes away as she falls into bed in my arms.

But the purpose of language is to unify and abstract -- for the things that happen only once and never again, there are no true names.