Snob

[snob]

A snob, guilty of snobbery, is someone who adopts the worldview that some people are inherently inferior to him/her for any one of a variety of reasons, including real or supposed intellect, wealth, education, ancestry, etc. Often, the form of snobbery reflects the offending individual's socio-economic background. For example, a common snobbery of the affluent is the affectation that wealth is either the cause or result of superiority, or both, as in the case of privileged children.

However, a form of snobbery can be adopted by someone not a part of that group; a pseudo-intellectual is a type of snob. Such a snob imitates the manners, adopts the worldview, and affects the lifestyle of a social class of people to which he or she aspires, but does not yet belong, and to which he or she may never belong.

A snob is perceived by those being imitated as an arriviste, perhaps nouveau riche or parvenu, and the elite group closes ranks to exclude such outsiders, often by developing elaborate social codes, symbolic status and recognizable marks of language. The snobs, in response, refine their behavior model.

Historical origins

Characteristically, snobs look down on people who are part of groups which they regard as inferior, or flaunt their wealth in order to make others seem inferior. Compare the points of view embodied in the informal and subjective categories of "highbrow" and its contrasted "lowbrow".

The Oxford English Dictionary finds the word snab in a 1781 document with the meaning of shoemaker with a Scottish origin. The connection between "snab", also spelled "snob", and its more familiar meaning arising in England fifty years later is not direct.

Though the once popular etymology of snob as a contraction of the Latin phrase sine nobilitate ("without nobility") is now discredited, a 1878 quote from the trade magazine The Tailor and Cutter admits no other interpretation: "it is the correct thing to vote a showily dressed man a snob.

It is agreed, however, that the word "snob" broke into broad public usage with William Makepeace Thackeray's Book of Snobs, a collection of satirical sketches that appeared in the magazine Punch, published in 1848. Thackeray's definition of snob then was: "He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob". The "mean things" were the showy things of this world, like a secretaryship in the Queen's Cabinet, where Prime Ministers invariably retired as earls.

"Suppose in a game of life — and it is but a twopenny game after all — you are equally eager of winning. Shall you be ashamed of your ambition, or glory in it?"

— Thackeray, "Autour de mon Chapeau", 1863

Thackeray had many opportunities to study snobs in action as he grew up. He was born in Calcutta, India, the only son of a Collector in the service of the British East India Company, a sphere of opportunity for Englishmen of talent whose social standing was an impediment to a career at home, but who in India could lord it like a "nabob". After his father died, Thackeray was sent home to England to be educated at the ancient and respectable (though not too stylish) public school Charterhouse, and at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Inverted snobbery

Inverted snobbery is the phenomenon of looking unfavorably on perceived social elites – effectively the opposite of snobbery. For instance, poorer members of society may consider themselves to be friendlier, happier, more honest or moral than richer members of the society, and middle-income members of society may stress their poorer origins. This is common in politics; for example, in Great Britain, MPs often say things such as "I grew up on a council estate" to try to prove their common roots, and in the United States, politicians often speak of such things as their "small town upbringing".

The term bourgeois is frequently used in North America to describe individuals who borrow veneers of upper classes in order to affect a sophisticated, cultured image.

A related phenomenon is for people who have worked hard to change their lives to be accused of having "betrayed their roots".

References

External links

Joseph Epstein, "In a snob-free zone": "Is there a place where one is outside all snobbish concerns—neither wanting to get in anywhere, nor needing to keep anyone else out?"