For most of us, snow is a four-letter word. Winter has lasted longer and been meaner this year than the decade prior. We are all yearning for spring to arrive and personally, I will hurt the first person who complains that they are hot. But seriously, you can’t be surprised that I found a taxonomy of snow. It was inevitable. This interesting taxonomy was discussed in Chicago Reader in the article, “A taxonomy of snow.”
This particular article, by Aimee Levitt, highlights upwards of a dozen different types of snow, carefully and humorously categorized by color, texture, resemblance, and so forth. Some interesting finds include powder snow, which is defined as “The freshest, purest, most lovely snow, all white and clean, the kind that makes you think of soft hotel beds and snow angels. Until you remember that you have to go out and shovel it.” Another is perennial snow, which means snow that stays around all year.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
Cute, but I suspect the writer is not a taxonomist. This is a list, a little glossary of snow, maybe a classification scheme at a stretch, but a not a taxonomy, which, according to Z39.19, is “A collection of controlled vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure.” Nice that the idea of knowledge organization is being more widely recognized, but the word “taxonomy” is losing its specific meaning in the process.