Tag: Inuktitut

 Snow used to make water. Snow selected specifically for melting and drinking — not any snow, but snow judged clean and suitable.

 Snow on the ground. Snow that has arrived and settled — no longer falling, not yet transformed by wind or sun or time.

 Wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh's runners. Snow defined not by what it looks like but by what it can do — a word that exists because of a specific, practical human relationship with frozen water.

 Crystalline, granular powder snow on the ground that looks like salt. The dry, sugary layer that forms near the base of a snowpack through temperature-gradient metamorphism.

 Snow falling. Not snow on the ground, not snow remembered — snow in the act of coming down.