Linguistic Deficiencies

I have heard or read several times during my life that the aboriginal peoples who inhabit Arctic regions use many different names to describe snow. When your survival depends on it, it must be very important to understand and describe to others all the different kinds of snow, fresh wet to powder dry, soft to icy hard. I wonder what it means that our modern urban culture has so many synonyms and slang terms to describe sexual relations and sex organs. I understand the interest in the topic, but why so many names. We also have a lot of ways to describe people for whom we have a low opinion: jerk, nitwit, moron, dope, nimcumpoop, and so on. Why do we seem to need so many names for stupid people or for what we cover up with underwear?

I think our culture needs special names for at least two forms of snow. I never know how to describe these forms, and they come up in conversation often enough that it would be convenient to have names for them.

The first is a form that inhabitants of northern climates who drive cars are familiar with. It is that clump of hardened sticky wet dirty icy snow that clings to the wheel wells or mud guards on our cars and trucks. People who have never lived in snowy areas may not know what I am talking about, so I have included a photo below. In the main, you can live your life ignoring this stuff, it eventually falls off, but if it doesn’t fall off on the way home, you have to clean or kick it off your car if you don’t want it melting in your garage overnight. That wet clump of melting snow, ice, road dirt, oil, salt, sand, is an awful thing to step in. As it melts it can get into all kinds of thing you were trying to keep dry. We need a name for that clump. The best that I have heard so far is “crut”, a variation of “crud” I think. The word has a lot going for it, it’s short, easy to spell and the sound of the word expresses both the nature of the substance and our feelings about it quite well. But maybe others have better candidates.

There is a second form of snow that is probably universally despised even more than the “crut” in our cars’ wheel wells. I am referring to the mound of packed road snow that snowplows leave across our driveways after they clean a street. Talking about what snowplows leave across our driveways is a favourite topic of conversation here in Canada after every snow storm. But we have no name for that mound, and it’s such a linguistic nuisance to keep calling it that “mound that the snowplow left”. Why don’t we have a name for this? I have included a picture of half a mound at the end of my driveway. I ran out of arm strength about halfway through shoveling yesterday.

Frankly, I am amazed that we here in Canadian cities put up with this. It’s bad enough having to clear the entire length of the driveway, but at least that’s freshly fallen clean snow, often just fluffy powder, but the “stuff that the snowplow leaves behind” is always dense, heavy, and usually deeper than what actually fell out of the sky. I find it incredible that we don’t insist that the road service crews clean away our driveway openings after plowing a street. Before amalgamation with Toronto, the City of North York provided exactly that service. A smaller plow, equipped with a swinging blade, followed the larger road plows around all day, and the operator dropped the blade long enough to clean off driveway entrances. Why would we do it any other way?