![]() “Everybody is special and a bit sensitive to being insulted or mocked or defeated or whatever. “And finally, it sort of hits home because I think, deep down, everybody is a snowflake,” Yagoda said. If being called a snowflake offends you, well, of course it does. That pulls the trigger.” Snowflake is another self-fulfilling prophesy. “Bullies’ historically favorite word is ‘crybaby,’ and nothing is probably more likely to elicit a bullied person crying than to be called a crybaby. “It’s a great word for bullying,” Yagoda added. Cupcake and buttercup do have the smack of the feminine about them - like the safe-for-work way of calling someone a cuck, an “alt-right” burn that originated in pornography- but snowflake carries with it “that idea of being unique and precious,” said Yagoda. “Buttercup,” another favorite of the anti-liberal set, has that hard “k,” too, as does “cupcake,” notably used by Megyn Kelly in her memoir, Settle for More, in describing her son, a “ walking cupcake” in his mother’s eyes, not to be confused with “the cupcakes on our nation’s campuses who need safe spaces.” But “snowflake has more things going for it,” said Yagoda. It dissolves right in your palm.Įffective slang possesses the same quality as a well-crafted pop song: It gets stuck in your head, whether you like it or not.Ī woman holds a poster during a protest opposing Britain’s exit from the European Union in Berlin, Saturday, July 2, 2016. Every little snowflake is different and has its own identity.”Īnd think of what happens to a snowflake once you get your hands on it. And the other side is the special side of it. It just fades away as soon as people are nasty to it. It melts under the heat, it has no backbone, no spine, no guts, no spirit, anything. Its power, Green said, comes largely from that duality. It just reflects the fact that there are huge and very strongly felt divisions in both our societies.”Īs insults go, it’s hard to think of one that so clearly conveys so many flaws at once: Fragility and self-importance, weakness and self-delusion. There’s always been one - my world, slang, is one of the great proponents and coiners of it - but it seems to me that these kind of very vicious, really, because they’re not meant with a laugh, these quite vicious insults have sprung up specifically within these two political areas, these explosions, that happened last year… This kind of very hard insult has come out of it. In the aftermath of Trump and Brexit, there has swelled up this vocabulary of vilification. The rise of the insult, Green continued, “is something, actually, that’s bigger than snowflake. “It’s a very specific, very politicized insult.” “I think it’s gone beyond slang,” said Jonathon Green, slang lexicographer and author of several dictionaries of slang. These people can often be seen congregating in ‘safe zones’ on college campuses.” A more aggressive definition went up the following month: “An entitled millenial SJW-tard who runs to her “safe space” to play with stress toys and coloring books when she gets ‘triggered” by various innocuous “microsaggressions’. You can see this linguistic evolution play out on Urban Dictionary: The 2008 definition of snowflake was “a person who think they are OMGUNIQUE!, but is, in fact, just like everyone else.” That was redefined in May of 2016 as “an overly sensitive person, incapable of dealing with any opinions that differ from their own. The insult expanded to encompass not just the young but liberals of all ages it became the epithet of choice for right-wingers to fling at anyone who could be accused of being too easily offended, too in need of “safe spaces,” too fragile. Helicopter parented to the hilt, millennials supposedly graduated from college (into a dismal economy with unprecedented mountains of student debt) too coddled for this cruel world, ill-equipped to face life’s indignities with dignity.īut as 2016 dawned, snowflake made its way to the mainstream and, in the process, evolved into something more vicious. It was a largely non-partisan slight - a mean, though not hateful, dig at millennials perceived to have an outsize sense of their own individuality and, by extension, importance. Before last year, snowflake-as-slang lingered on the fringes of the lexicon.
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