Eskimos have 48 different words for “snow,” right? Actually, no, they don’t, regardless of what your junior high English teacher told you, and by the way, there is no such language as Eskimo. “Anthropologists [have been] throwing around all kinds of figures for the number of words Eskimo supposedly [have] for snow without any facts to back them up.” Various efforts are underway to debunk the myth, but linguistic misinformation is often quite hard to counter, especially once the general public believes it knows the truth.