Ah...will make note and read tonight before I return the book to the library.

In reading that story, I also learned the word flaner, with a circumflex over the a, meaning to walk without a specific destination, just sort of absorbing the atmosphere. I haven't found a comparable word in English, yet.

Amble? Not quite it, I guess.

Meander? Wander? Stroll? Ramble? Roam? Traipse? Saunter?

eta...

Rove?

Meander is good!

I love words. Where is it they have, like, thirty different words for snow?

You could also read the Dupin stories, since Poe is often credited with inventing the modern detective story and many of its plots. "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a locked-room mystery, "The Purloined Letter" is about hiding a clue in plain sight, etc.

I think the urban legend is about the Inuit, but the original number (whatever it was) was a gross exaggeration. I still like the the truthiness of it -- that a people will have a lot of specific terms for something that looms importantly in their collective experience. I riffed on that for my Nana's eulogy -- pre-Google -- so I unknowingly perpetuated the urban legend. Go me.

The snow words thing is an urban legend?! My naivete is so sad.

"Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a locked-room mystery, "The Purloined Letter" is about hiding a clue in plain sight, etc.

We read those for Wednesday. Or, we were supposed to. I haven't gotten through them yet, but I must before I return the book.

The snow words thing is an urban legend?! My naivete is so sad.

I don't know how urban legendy it is. I think at one point, the commonly reported number (in the legend) got up to 400. The Inuit may well have more than one word for snow.

I would Snopes this, but I'm too lazy and still haven't eaten, which is bad.

The snow thing is a very truthy urban legend. I.e., no there are not 30 Inuit words for snow, but if you count phrases, and, hey, try it in English, you do get quite a few: hail, slush, sleet, hardpack, a light dusting, blizzard, whiteout, snowman snow...

The original legend was part of a thesis about how vocabulary may shape cognition, such that, if your native language has only 1 word for all the shades of green, then you see all shades of green as alike. But that's been demonstrated to be false, and also, when peole don't have a word for something, as with flaner, they just make one up, or borrow it from another language! Or say doohickey or thingamabobber.

According to my secret boyfriend, "QI" host Stephen Fry, it is an urban legend, and they only have four words for snow. They do, however, have thirty different kinds of demonstrative pronouns, whereas English only has four (this, that, these, those). They apparently have words that mean "the thing under that other thing" and "the thing near us that we can't actually see" and suchlike.