The Straight Dope... a "classic" (at least, according to the directory naming convention)
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_297.htmland a funny follow-up (apparently some senseofhumour-impaired individuals emailed the author!)
http://straightdope.com./columns/010202.html"The allegedly large number of words Eskimos have for snow is widely adduced as evidence for what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the gist of which is that language reflects a culture's preoccupations and in so doing imposes certain patterns of thought on individual members of that culture."
PS: In case (and this never happens) anyone cares why on God's green earth (holy crap Lois what great weather we've been having lately!) I was reading this (i.e. how I found this site), well I was indeed reading on Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis - and hey look there's also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_a...mming_languages ! ) about the S-W hypothesis (no that's not Star Wars, we're talking linguistics now, the art of talking and such) and now I know, the "nine words" is sortatrue, sortamyth. Kinda like the acting talents of Tom Cruise.
BoNuS! A few dozen funny silly profound or painfully true
programming epigrams!
...Darren Dirt, enjoying the caffeine...
And as a programmer, I just had to let the conditional block of code finish executing.
Thus Spake David Cerezo! (re. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its relation to programming languages - worth a read just to find the link to this
Language Timeline!)
Better than the eipgrams, I just found some
biting words by a sorta-well-known now-dead computer scientist, and some of you will probably enjoy them (I'm looking at you, Mr. A...)
Okay, enough distractions. And now, back to work. :P