A good corrective: "Smilla's Sense of Snow"(novel 1992, Hoeg). As I recall there was no reference at all to a dizzying vocabulary for snow, just a highly-honed ability to read into marks & degree of melting/freezing at the edge of marks, for tracking purposes.
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That reminds me of the day I went in a book store and found a bound book but all the pages were blank. I asked the clerk about it and he told me it was thirty-nine dollars. I couldn't believe the price for a book with nothing in it. "It's actually a highly technical Eskimo treatise on snow. Those white pages are illustrations."