Snow Leopard is a terrible name
Image via Wikipedia
The new Mac OS is called Snow Leopard. This is a terrible name.
As I understood it, the entire purpose of having the new OS was to offer a more streamlined, stripped down, version of Leopard, the current OS — and from what I read on TechCrunch, the new OS is indeed slimmer — however, the problem is that snow leopards are not stripped down and leaner than actual leopards. They are furrier, heavier, thicker, more muscular, bulkier, and fuzzier. Their paws, for example, are way bigger. With this new OS Mac was trying to aim for a smaller footprint yet it named its OS after a cat with a bigger footprint.
Maybe the Mac people were trying to tell us that this new OS is a close cousin of the original 10.0 OS and that’s why they just stuck a “snow” in front of the “leopard.”
Fail. Reality is that the snow leopard is not actually closely related to a leopard at all. Here is an expert website:
“Although sharing its name with the common leopard, the snow leopard is not believed to be closely related to the Leopard or the other members of the Pantherine group and is classified as the sole member of the genus Uncia uncia. Due to the under-development of the fibro-elastic tissue that forms part of the vocal apparatus the snow leopard cannot give a full, deep roar and this along with differences in skull characteristics help to separate it from its fellow ‘big cats’.”
So if a snow leopard is less developed — not to mention weaker roaring — than the regular leopard then Mac’s decision to use the name to describe a more developed OS does not make sense.
Finally, just as an aside, I am curious what would happen if the next OS were called…Black Panther.
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You are an exteremly talented writer, Mr. Eteraz and you wit is razor sharp. I have thoroughly enjoyed this post.
From the list of 1024 reasons to hate Mac OSX, you sucessfully picked number 1024. Congratulations on the useless post. Oh, and thanks for storing your readers’ passwords in plaintext.
[...] I am filing this post in the category about why Mac’s Snow Leopard was a crime against language. [...]