Maybe you’ve heard that Eskimos have dozens of words for ice and snow. We’ve only got two, with maybe slush thrown in. Makes sense. If you stare at nothing but shades of white all day (days that last six months,, I might add), you’d probably try to stretch as much out of it as possible. And that’s not even counting husky snow, an inside joke for Frank Zappa fans.

Remember Sniglets, words for things that don’t have words? Like crummox, the leftover cereal in the bottom of a box that’s too much to throw away, but too little for a full bowl? Or how about aquadextrous, the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes?

There are legions of arcane words (kind of like arcane that have been retired for various reasons. We call a group of lions a pride, and a bunch of wolves a pack, but have you ever heard of a skulk of foxes or a clowder of cats? How about a crash of rhinoceroses or a murder of crows? They’re just as real; we just don’t use them anymore.

A place where you buy food used to be called a market, then a grocery, then a supermarket. According to grocery business magazines, the 40 cash register, football-field-sized modern variety market is called — I’m not kidding — a hypermarket. Now, where exactly does it go from there? A mega-market? A humongo-market? Like I said, we’re flat out of words, and have painted ourselves into a linguistic corner.

And lest you think this drought of naming imagination is a relic of horse-and-buggy days, the hard drive manufacturer LaCie names their products this way: LaCie mini, LaCie Hard Drive, LaCie Hard Drive Extreme, LaCie Big Disk Extreme with Triple Interface, LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme with Triple Interface, LaCie Biggest F800, and the LaCie Biggest S2S 5-disk RAID System Tower. This is not a paid advertisement, but if anyone from LaCie is reading, we could really use a couple of those big guys around the office.

Some words have grown feeble with over-use. Nothing labeled “ultimate” ever is. And the word AWESOME used as a description for anything but God and Category 5 hurricanes needs to be toned down a bit, too. Sorry if I’m sounding cranky.

Some words are just plain confusing. The whole “FLAMMABLE-INFLAMMABLE” thing is bad enough, but I recently saw a dumpster labeled “COMMINGLED TRASH—RECYCLABLE.” What’s the difference between “commingled” and just plain “mingled”? Is this co-dependant garbage? Are they saying the trash is recyclables only — paper and plastic — or they are allowing the recycled trash to co-exist peacefully with rotten peaches and yesterday's Egg McMuffins? And can you say “recyclables” five times, real fast?

And finally, is there anything that can smother words in their cradles faster than the intrusion of science and engineering? After all, software engineers are responsible for naming the World Wide Web, the only name in existence where the initials are harder to say, and have more syllables, than the words themselves. Consider the names of these telescopes currently in use or under construction: The Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona; the Very Large Telescope in Chile; the Giant Magellan Telescope, also in Chile; (hold on now) the Extremely Large Telescope in sunny California; and my personal favorite, the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, or OWL. They haven’t picked a location for OWL just yet. I mean, where’s an Overwhelmingly Large Thing going to fit without Vaseline and a shoehorn?

What’s next? Hey, The Overbearing Whopper Gigante Hyperscope Supreme sounds good to me.