$#@&?%! and Other Words for Snow

Snow has been on my mind a lot lately. Winter this year in Rhode Island has been unusually cold and snowy; the normal total snowfall in December and January is 17.1 inches, and this winter we have had 35 inches so far (Salit, 2009).

For me, it’s been especially hard to cope with after spending the first couple of weeks of January in the southern hemisphere summer in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For much of that time, the temperature was in the mid-90 degrees (more about my trip in future posts).

This winter confirms the silliness of that hoary myth about the 9, 48, 100, or 400 words for snow that Eskimos supposedly have. Actually, the Eskimos don’t have any more words for snow than New Englanders do. As Richard Salit put it in his 2/1/09 article in the Providence Journal, "Colder, Harsher Winter,"

“If Eskimos have lots of words for snow (which is apparently a myth), Rhode Islanders, especially public works directors, probably have a few choice words of their own for the stuff.”

Linguist Steven Pinker (1995), in The Language Instinct, succinctly analyzes how the myth of Eskimo words for snow took off, referring to work by anthropologist Laura Martin and linguist Geoffrey Pullman. (See my post of 8/29/08, “What’s the difference between a chimpanzee, a sewage sludge hauler, and my mother?” for another debunking by Steven Pinker).

It’s a good case study in how the misinterpretation of an obscure scientific observation by a careless amateur with an ideological agenda can blow up into a wildly inaccurate factoid.

“In 1911, [anthropologist Franz] Boas casually mentioned that Eskimos used four unrelated word roots for snow. [Insurance inspector and amateur scholar of Native American languages Benjamin Lee] Whorf embellished the count to seven and implied that there were more. His article was widely reprinted, then cited in textbooks and popular books on language, which led to successively inflated estimates in other textbooks, articles, and newspaper columns of Amazing Facts.” (p. 64)

Pullman, as cited by Pinker, theorized that a patronizing, racist attitude toward “primitive” cultures encouraged the “credulous transmission and elaboration of a false claim” that would not be intellectually interesting even if it were true: “Botanists have names for leaf shapes; decorators have names for shades of mauve.” (p. 64)

The myth about Eskimo words for snow has spawned a plethora of popular culture references. Ministers have gotten a lot of mileage out of it for sermons on various topics. Many comical lists of fake Eskimo words for snow have been created, such as one by Phil James, quoted by David Mendosa (example: hahatla, small packages of snow given as gag gifts).

It occurs to me, as the millionth snowstorm of the season is taking place outside my window, that the English vocabulary for snow isn’t nearly enough for Rhode Islanders to accurately express their feelings about snow. I propose the need for a few more words to cover the following concepts:

• Pretty snow on the trees
• Snow on your driveway that has to be shoveled
• The three-foot-tall compacted pile of snow, dirt, and rocks blocking the driveway you have just shoveled after the city plows your street
• A snowstorm that dumps 10 inches of snow on your driveway after you have just finished shoveling the 8 inches of snow from the previous storm
• Snow as perceived by children when a snow day is declared
• Snow as perceived by the Department of Public Works at the beginning of winter
• Snow as perceived by the Department of Public Works halfway through the season when the snow removal budget has already run out
• Snow piled up on your car
• Snow that falls in spring and buries the daffodils that have just started blooming
• The imaginary snow that people from normally snow-free Buenos Aires envision who think it would be really cool to visit Rhode Island in the winter
• The actual snow that people from normally snow-free Buenos Aires experience that leads them to admit you were right that they should have visited in summer instead
• A half-inch snowfall in a major metropolitan area where it has not snowed for 89 years, causing the city to grind to a halt and the residents to go endearingly berserk (see photo of Buenos Aires television newscast, winter of 2007: “Breaking news: It’s snowing”)

This is just a start; I’m sure there are a lot of other concepts I haven’t covered. But according to Punxsutawney Phil, we have at least six more weeks of winter, so there will be plenty more opportunities to think about snow.

References
ITV News. 2009. “US Celebrates Groundhog Day,” Independent Television News (February 3), www.itv.com/News/Articles/US-celebrates-Groundhog-Day-441714330.html.

Mendosa, David. 2005. “Inuit Words for Snow,” Mendosa.com, www.mendosa.com/snow.html.

Pinker, Steven. 1995. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins.

Salit, Richard. 2009. “A Colder, Harsher Winter,” Providence Journal (February 1), www.projo.com/news/content/WINTER_SO_FAR_02-01-09_7ID4ANA_v31.3bce1fa.html#.

What’s the difference between a chimpanzee, a sewage sludge hauler, and my mother?

As I discovered while following the plight of an Austrian chimpanzee called Hiasl, that’s a very good question.

A Chimpanzee
Hiasl was captured in Sierra Leone in 1982. A pharmaceutical company attempted to smuggle him into Austria for its vivisection laboratory, but he was seized in customs. In 2007, the sanctuary where he had ended up went bankrupt, and a philanthropist wanted to donate money for his support. But according to Austrian law, only a person can receive money. The sanctuary’s creditors would get the donation – and the vivisection lab would get Hiasl.

Paula Stibbe, a British animal rights activist, petitioned the Austrian courts to be appointed as Hiasl’s legal guardian, but she would have to establish that Hiasl was a person. Chimpanzees, the argument went, shared 96 to 98.4% of human DNA and had a culture of sorts, so they should be considered people and granted certain human rights.

The Austrian courts rejected the argument, reasoning that Hiasl did not need a guardian, because he is not a disabled person – he is a normal chimpanzee. Furthermore, comparing a chimpanzee to a disabled person might encourage the perception that disabled people are like animals. The case is now being appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. (See References below for sources on Hiasl's story).

My Mother
I know what the Austrian judge means. Advocates for considering apes as humans rely on arguments such as this one, quoted in What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes, by bioethicist Jonathan Marks (2002, p. 190) in a discussion of the ethical quagmire such an argument bogs down in:

“We give human rights to children, to the aged and to the mentally infirm, to the autistic, to the deaf and dumb.... [Apes] can reason and communicate at least as well as some of the children and disabled humans to whom we accord human rights.”

My mother, in the last 7 years of her life, was one of those disabled people to whom Hiasl was being compared. I find that comparison inappropriate. A devastating stroke left my mother paralyzed and unable to communicate, even at the level that a chimpanzee might ask for a banana. When I was appointed as her legal guardian, it was to administer the complex legal, financial, medical, and personal affairs of what had once been a thoughtful, vibrant, active human being. It was not to accept donations on her behalf to save her from being sent to a vivisection laboratory.

Using a certain level of cognition, communications, and culture as a test to determine personhood has troubling implications. Scholars like Marks and linguist Steven Pinker are appalled at the common assumption that the “factoid” that chimpanzees share 98% of human DNA means that they are 98% human (Marks, 2002; Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, 1995, pp. 334–351). Marks points out that using degree of cognition to define humanity supports the central argument of books like The Bell Curve that put what looks like genetics at the service of repellent social and political philosophies.

Pinker analyzes the scientifically unsound nature of many of the claims that apes can use human language, like in the case of the chimpanzee Washoe, who was said to have learned American Sign Language:

“This preposterous claim is based on the myth that ASL is a crude system of pantomimes and gestures, rather than a full language with complex phonology, morphology, and syntax.” (p. 337)

The people who claimed to have taught Washoe ASL were all hearing people, Pinker says. The only deaf native ASL signer on the team asserted that none of Washoe’s gestures were really ASL signs.

We’re not doing a favor to animals, either, by insisting that they must be nearly as smart and articulate as we are to be worthy of humane treatment. Pinker asks, “What about all the creepy, nasty, selfish animals who do not remind us of ourselves.... Can we go ahead and wipe them out?” (p. 336)

A Sewage Sludge Hauler
We are especially confused about what personhood means in the U. S., due to the unusual interpretations we have historically made of the centuries-old legal principle that treats corporations as “persons”:

“The 14th Amendment was passed to protect the rights of former slaves after the Civil War. However, that very amendment became the favorite tool of lawyers seeking to establish corporations as “natural persons,” assuring them the human rights of due process, equal protection, freedom of speech, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. In the same year they extended the 14th Amendment to corporations, the Supreme Court overturned a major civil rights act....

"Throughout the U.S., the civil rights of African-Americans were being scaled back in other courts, paving the way for segregation. In 1938, Justice Hugo Black remarked that of the cases in which the Supreme Court applied the 14th Amendment during the first 50 years after Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific, “less that one-half of 1% invoked it in protection of the Negroe race, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.” (Ecology Center)

In 2006, one township in Pennsylvania was so fed up with corporations dumping toxic sewage sludge that it took an unusual action, described in Mother Jones:

“[Licking Township] had passed an anti-sludge ordinance, only to be sued by a sludge hauler called Synagro, which argued that the township had infringed on its rights under the 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War to guarantee "equal protection" to all. Synagro could make that argument because since the late 19th century, the Supreme Court has defined corporations as legal "persons," conferring on them many of the same rights that belong to flesh-and-blood citizens. And so, Licking's supervisors did something that has been variously described as creative, futile, or out-and-out revolutionary: They passed an ordinance declaring that henceforth, in their township, 'Corporations shall not be considered to be "persons" protected by the Constitution of the United States.'"

What's the Difference?
It's hard to dispute that humans ought to feel some responsibility for getting Hiasl out of the fix they have put him in. But conferring personhood on chimpanzees is not the answer. The world doesn’t need more confusion about who is a “real” human being and what hierarchy of rights should be granted to people who are “almost” human. On that topic, we’re confused enough already.

References
Bryner, Jeanna. "Court Claim: Chimps Are People, Too." Live Science, May 29, 2008.

Connolly, Kate. "Court to Rule if Chimp Has Human Rights." UK Guardian/The Observer, April 1, 2007.

Ecology Center. "Corporation as Person." Spring 2001. Berkeley, CA.

Keim, Brandon. "Should Chimpanzees Be Given Human Rights?" Wired Science. May 11, 2007.

Kole, William J. "Activists Want Chimp Declared a 'Person.'" Breitbart.com, May 4, 2008.

Marks, Jonathan. What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press, 2002.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, pp. 334-351.

Stafford, Ned. "Chimp Denied Legal Guardian.", BioEd Online. April 26, 2007.

tzramsoy. "If a Chimp Gets Its Rights…" BrainEthics, May 29, 2007.

Yeoman, Barry. "When Is a Corporation Like a Freed Slave?"
Mother Jones, November/December 2006.