the.com/snowflake
nature's proof that no mass-produced thing ever beat a one-off original.
means A single ice crystal that forms in clouds, usually with six sides — and, in modern slang, a dismissive term for someone seen as overly sensitive or easily offended.
from A plain compound of 'snow' and 'flake,' both old Germanic words — 'snow' traces back through Old English 'snaw' to a root shared across Indo-European languages (a cousin of Latin 'nix' and Greek 'nipha'), and 'flake' likely relates to Old Norse and the idea of something flat that flakes or peels off. The word for the falling crystal is centuries old; the insulting sense is a recent twist. The popular tale credits the 1996 novel and film 'Fight Club' with the line about not being a 'special snowflake,' which helped the put-down spread — though the image of a uniquely precious snowflake had floated around well before that.
- six sides
- hexagonal symmetry from water's molecular bond angles
- no twins
- too many crystal paths to ever repeat
- slow fall
- drifts down at roughly one mile per hour
- mostly air
- snow is over 90 percent trapped air
- sky-built
- each grows around a single dust speck
wilson bentley photographs — vermont farmer documented over 5,000 individual snowflake crystals between 1885-1931
kenneth libbrecht experiments — caltech physicist grew designer snowflakes in laboratory since 1995