In the run-up to the US elections, which saw Donald Trump elected as president, it was a term “lobbed especially fiercely by those on the right side of the political spectrum at those on the left,” said Merriam-Webster. The term solidified as a politically charged insult around 2016. In 1860s Missouri, the term was also used by abolitionists to describe people who were opposed to the abolition of slavery, “the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people”.īut the available evidence suggests that this use of the term seems never to have “moved much beyond the borders of Missouri or the era”. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”īut the term was also used long before then, said the dictionary site, in the 1970s as “a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white” as well as a “slang term for cocaine”. This use of the term snowflake for young, overly sensitive and even fragile millennial adults likely has its origins in Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 cult book Fight Club, said US dictionary Merriam-Webster, where one zealous member of Tyler Durden’s violent club tells the other members: “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. The term emerged first in American campuses a few years prior to 2016 as a “means of criticising the hypersensitivity of a younger generation, where it was tangled up in the debate over safe spaces and no platforming”, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian.
0 kommentar(er)
