Word of the Week: Snizzle

Snizzle: A mixture of snow and drizzle. The oft-repeated line about Eskimos having "hundreds" of words for snow is a myth that's been roundly and repeatedly refuted by linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum and others. For the latest in the flurry, see this Language Log post. In fact, English does quite well itself in the words-for-snow department: consider blizzard, slush, powder, corn, drift, and--a recent addition to my own vocabulary of precipitation--graupel (snow pellets).