A Kind of Blue1此蓝非彼蓝

Environments can affect language—just not in the way you may think.

环境影响语言，但如何影响却非你所想。

Everyone knows the Eskimos have dozens， if not hundreds， of words for snow because of their intimate knowledge of their environment. Except that everyone cannot “know” this， because knowledge requires a statement to be true. In fact， the Eskimo snow story is a factoid2， a word coined by Norman Mailer3 for a fun， roughly fact-shaped object that is not， in fact， a fact—in the same way a “spheroid” is not quite a sphere.

尽人皆知，爱斯基摩人对其生活的环境非常了解，于是他们就有几十甚至几百个表示“雪”的词。（剩余7033字）