August 13, 2009

Cultural Differences - II

The other day, in a group we were discussing number of words English has for “idiot”. You know, moron, imbecile, dumb, dork, blockhead, simpleton, half-wit, dummy, dolt, dunce, fathead etc etc.

Then someone mentioned how Eskimos have around 31 words for snow. Then someone else mentioned a tribe somewhere who rely a lot on their smelling sense and hence have a rich lexicon for different types of odors as opposed to English language.

So every culture has words to describe the subtle differences in the grade of the object abundant in that culture.  And then we came back to how many words English language have for idiots! 

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