By this time in your lives, I'm sure you've all heard that Eskimos have 68 words for snow, or 409 or something. I don't know where this idea came from, but whenever I talk to anyone about language and how it represents culture, they nod sagely and tell me that the Eskimos have so-and-so-many words for snow. It's never the same number. And it's never that the Aborigines have X number of words for horizon, or the Tahitians have Y number for sand. Somehow Eskimos became the example — probably in a 4th grade textbook that was distributed to all public schools in 1956.

This week a friend who knows I've been to Lappland sent me an article. The story is that because of global warming, migratory birds are inching their way farther north every year, causing confusion to populations who've never seen them before. So the Lapps, who according to this article have 1200 words for reindeer, don't have any words for barn owl or robin or titmouse.

Well, I live smack in the middle of titmouse territory, and I still only have one word for them. But I do have several words for woodpecker. Around here we have ladderback, red-headed, and Nuttall's woodpeckers, although it took me a long time to figure out that the ones nesting in my apple tree were Nuttall's, because they look quite unlike any of the pictures in Peterson or Sibley.

I can imagine inventing a new word for my particular woodpeckers, along the lines of Nuttall-with-no-red-neck-patch, or something. I assume that's how all those reindeer names were invented, through trying to identify specific variations: cantankerous old reindeer with broken antler, pregnant reindeer who always drops twins and they live.

No one goes to this kind of trouble unless it's important to them. If people in my town were trying to make a living off of titmice, you know we'd have more words for them. Instead, I'm sorry to say, what we have a lot of words for are complicated coffee drinks. Also cars. Things we have around us in large number and need to be able to identify. I find this enormously depressing, but keep in mind that I didn't choose to stay in Lappland, I was only there for three weeks and it was summer.

The corollary to this language-as-culture idea came from one of my students, who brought in a poem the other day called "Amrita." When we looked blank, she said it was an ancient word, probably Sanskrit, for the mixing of sexual juices. One delicate word for something that it takes a lot of fumbling and blushing to say in five words of English.

Language is a big mirror. It reflects back to us what we as a group are interested in. I hope you're thinking what I'm thinking. Time to brush up on our Sanskrit. And learning a new language is much easier with a partner...