Re-reading Making Money today.

[conuly]

"Trolls don't have a word for machismo in much the same way that puddles don't have a word for water."

Do you think that's a variant of the "Eskimos have 20 zillion words for snow" line? (BTW - they don't by any sensible view of the word (no more than we do, certainly), and it wouldn't matter if they did.)

Comments

[tsukikage85.livejournal.com]

Are we talking trolls in the internet sense or the fairytale sense?

[conuly]

In the Discworld sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Discworld%29

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of the claims that such and such a language (usually that belonging to an 'enemy' culture) doesn't have a word for "freedom" or "love" or "identity," etc., but with the determinism inverted.

(Also, I just finished the audio book of Going Postal and am itching to revisit Making Money.)

[conuly]

We didn't have a word for "genocide" until pretty recently either, but we sure did it. If we didn't have a word for "freedom" or "love", that doesn't mean we couldn't want it. (And isn't that happier than doing genocide?)

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. But it was a pretty common tactic during the Cold War to claim (falsely, or semi-falsely) that, say, the Russians didn't have a word for "freedom" or "privacy" or "compromise" as proof that they were the Borg.

As if we English speakers don't get ohrwurmer just because we don't have a nice neat word for it.

Pratchett much more sensibly points out that a lack of a word doesn't necessarily mean a lack of a quality - just a lack of alternatives to that quality necessitating a label to differentiate it.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I suppose it's an inversion of the same theme, yeah.

IIRC, Pterry is talking about this line (or a similar line from Small Gods, not certain) and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in The Folklore of Discworld - I think he's actually bringing up (and dismantling) the Eskimo line in that context. But I'd have to look it up to be sure, it's been a year since I read that. Or it might have been on tvTropes. *scratches head*