Leave it to a linguist to spoil Creative Writing. I had a concept a-simmering in my brain for the text I’d write for today’s photo post. Then ol’-party-pooper Google sends a smart aleck "expert" my way to tell me my story line is “Urban Legend,” a canard, a bunch of baloney.
Ugh! What am I supposed to do now for a literary “hook”?
Maybe you too have heard that the native Inuit people of Alaska have dozens or even hundreds of words to describe “snow”? Well I live in the mossy, oh-so-drippy Pacific Northwest. Though there are some months when it rains nearly every day here, the past month has been sunny and “perfect.” In the last two months, we’ve had one day of rain at my house.
Finally yesterday we got a sweet, blessed, all-day rain. The birds sang happily and splashed about. Brown gardens returned to green overnight. All is right again with our world.
So my thought as I sat down to write this text was this: Rain is synonymous with the Pacific Northwest. Snow equals Alaska. I Googled “Inuit/Words/Snow” to refresh my memory of how many words Inuit storytellers have on the tips of their tongues when they’re riffing on the weather, only to learn that those dudes don’t have any more ways to say “snow” than I do.
“Urban Legend,” says a linguist I found via Google, debunking the tale I'd heard.
I just hate it when reality gets in the way of a good story.
