We all get offended when we are attacked, I have seen “snowflakes” by both sides and have been blocked and unfriended by people of both sides who can’t handle any kind of disagreement. One person whom I agreed with about 95% of everything they said but that little bit I didn’t agree with earned me a block on social media.
Emily Brewster, lexicographer and associate editor at Merriam-Webster, found what she believes is the earliest use of snowflake as an epithet: Early 1860s in Missouri, as the Civil War began and citizens battled over whether or not slavery should continue within the state. “A snowflake was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery,” Brewster said. “They were called snowflakes because it said they valued white people over black people.”
The other two bits of Missouri slang from that political moment — the “claybank,” a group that wanted gradual transition from slavery to freedom plus compensation for slave owners, and the “charcoals,” also known as “brown radicals,” who pushed for immediate emancipation and for black people to be able to enlist in the armed forces — didn’t stick. And for a long time, neither did snowflake. It was about a century before snowflake slang made its way back into the vernacular, when it was used to describe “a white person or a black person who was perceived as acting too much like a white person,” according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.
“Snowball” was also used as a term for a black person, Green said, as far back as the 1780s; Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms from 1848 defines snowball as “a jeering appellation for a negro.” For a time, snowflake and snowball were used interchangeably in this manner. “It’s this thing about, ‘ha, ha, ha, here’s a black person, let’s call him something white,’” said Green. And even as snowflake and snowball were used in technically non-racial contexts, like as slang for cocaine, “it’s [still] to do with the whiteness.”
The earliest documented appearance of snowflake with its current gist comes from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, published in 1996 (emphasis added):
“You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
The quote was included in the 1999 film adaptation of the same name, in the dulcet tones of a Brad Pitt voiceover:
Before last year, snowflake-as-slang lingered on the fringes of the lexicon. 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.
But as 2016 dawned, snowflake made its way to the mainstream and, in the process, evolved into something more vicious. 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.
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. 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’ [sic].”
As 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.
Its power, Green said, comes largely from that duality. Snowflake “works in two ways. It melts under the heat, it has no backbone, no spine, no guts, no spirit, anything. It just fades away as soon as people are nasty to it. And the other side is the special side of it. Every little snowflake is different and has its own identity.”
And think of what happens to a snowflake once you get your hands on it. It dissolves right in your palm.
Snowflake opens soft and closes with a hard “k” kicker. “There’s this idea in comedy that words with a ‘k’ ’are funny… and it has impact to it.” Snowflake also clicks nicely with “special” — and, for formal occasions, sparkly — which “rhetorically, has the alliteration going for it.” Cupcake and buttercup are also similar words that have the hard “k” sound as well as being words to insult liberals.
“And finally, it sort of hits home because I think, deep down, everybody is a snowflake,” Yagoda said. “Everybody is special and a bit sensitive to being insulted or mocked or defeated or whatever. Good bullies understand that the most effective insults are the ones that hit home.”
The liberal left in return calls Trump a snowflake. He is, after all, a man who has yet to display an ability to laugh at himself. He is offended by, seemingly, everything anyone has ever said about him that is not sufficiently glowing. He is a man who cannot even bear the (really rather soft) satire slung his way by Saturday Night Live and the Late Night talk shows, also claiming they have low ratings despite ratings are often very high to historical high. He has attacked the Hamilton play, football players, individual reporters, people in his own party and before being nominated would insult everyone he debated with. For the last 25 years, Donald Trump has been sending pictures of his hands to Graydon Carter to prove his fingers are properly proportioned, the Vanity Fair editor has revealed. The bizarre, decades-long feud between the journalist and the billionaire presidential candidate began when Carter wrote an essay for Spy magazine calling Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian.”
If branding the political opposition with a nickname is a longstanding tradition, it’s also one that almost inevitably backfires. A group united by an offensive label is still united: it’s only a matter of flipping the name into a self-identifier. “Tory,” and “Whig” are both political party names that rose out of insults. The “Sans-culottes” during the French revolution likewise re-appropriated an insult about their lack of britches into a point of anti-elitist pride. From queers to suffragettes to impressionist painters, terms meant to deride become a catchy point of pride, a snarky acknowledgment of appealing underdog status that galvanizes membership. People who thought Hillary Clinton was referring to them as “deplorable” put it in their Twitter names; women who related when Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman” responded by emblazoning the phrase on their t-shirts. The only way to fight back against an insult that doesn’t mean anything is to reclaim it, to diminish its power by making that identity a point of pride. This is the life cycle of all identity insults, and “snowflake” is already reaching the end of that cycle. For many who are called snowflakes they embrace it and return fire with “and winter is coming”.
Sources: http://thinkprogress.org/all-the-special-snowflakes-aaf1a922f37b/
http://www.gq.com/story/why-trump-supporters-love-calling-people-snowflakes