Merriam-Webster tweets definition of “snowflake,” which is somehow a political act
Tweeting out definitions of words is now somehow political, as Merriam-Webster defines “fact” in the age of “alternative facts” and harnesses the power of its look-up data to explore the larger implications when a word like “demonstrator” gets extra attention. Today’s write-up of the meaning of “snowflake”—beyond the obvious snowy one—comes on the heels of people on the right using it to describe opposition in a derisive way. And it turns out this isn’t the first time “snowflake” has been used in a political sense: Merriam-Webster writes that “In Missouri in the early 1860s, a ‘snowflake’ was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.”