So someone named Geoff Pullum called this a hoax. Now that claim may be wrong. Did the journalist find some explanation of why Pullum said that? I'm curious.
Here is his essay, if you’re wondering! It’s short and zippy and pretty fun—has the flavor of that slightly smug, sarcastic, sassy contrarianism of the New Atheists’ writing in that time—
> What i do here is very little more than an extended review and elaboration on Laura Martin's wonderful American Anthropologist report of 1986. Laura Martin is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Cleveland State University. She endures calmly the fact that virtually no one listened to her when she first published. It may be that few will listen to me as I explain in different words to another audience what she pointed out. But the truth is that the Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families of related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever said they do. Anyone who insists on simply checking their primary sources will find that they are quite unable to document the alleged facts about snow vocabulary (but nobody ever checks, because the truth might not be what the reading public wants to hear).
