Eskimo Snow sighting!

I'm always on the alert for references to those wacky Eskimos and their multiplicitous words for snow, and just caught one in a New Yorker article (5/28/08 - yes, I'm a little behind) about hangovers, and the words that different languages have for hangover:

In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos' nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover.

Nine, huh?  You gotta love the precision.  And the implication about the Ukrainians is most unkind...

(Image from here; I hope it's okay to use it - I'm never really sure what the rules are on this...)

Unsettling interpretation of Chinese characters? 'busy'

We all know the Language Log debunking of the story that in Chinese, the character for crisis is made up of danger + opportunity. (Here's one example.) Yesterday I was talking to somebody who said that they no longer use the word busy, because the Chinese character for busy is made up of heart + kill(ed). If you google this, you get a ton of new-agey sites (many of them christian), many using 'dead' instead of 'kill/killed'. Really?

Whatever the facts and history, Science had an article on mental health in China a couple years ago (Greg Miller, "China: Healing the Metaphorical Heart") and he quotes Dominic Lee (a psychiatrist) as saying "There are more than 100 Chinese characters for emotion that contain the heart symbol in combination with others," so the cliche may have its heart in the right place, at least.

Of course I don't quite get how this logic encourages you to change speech or other behavior. To people drinking coffee, maybe you could try saying "In my language, you know, the word for 'coffee' is 'goat piss'."

Whatevs.