snob

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A snob is someone who adopts the worldview of snobbery — that some people are inherently inferior to him or 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 snob's personal attributes. For example, a common snobbery of the affluent is the belief that wealth is either the cause or result of superiority, or both, and a common snobbery of the physically attractive is that beauty is paramount.

However, a form of snobbery can be adopted by someone not a part of that group; a pseudo-intellectual, a celebrity worshiper, and a poor person idolizing money and the rich are types of snobs who do not base their snobbery on their personal attributes. Such a snob idolizes and imitates, if possible, the manners, worldview, and lifestyle of a classification of people to which they aspire, but do not belong, and to which they may never belong (wealthy, famous, intellectual, beautiful, etc.).

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.^[1] William Hazlitt observed, in a culture where deference to class was accepted as a positive and unifying principle,^[2] "Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it, William Hazlitt observed, adding subversively, "It is a sign the two things are not very far apart.""^[3] Bulwer-Lytton remarked in passing, "Ideas travel upwards, manners downwards."^[4] It was not the deeply ingrained and fundamentally accepted idea of "one's betters" that has marked snobbism in traditional European and American culture, but "aping one's betters".

Snobbism is a defensive expression of social insecurity, flourishing most where an Establishment has become less than secure in the exercise of its traditional prerogatives, and thus it was an organizing principle for Thackeray's glimpses of British society in the threatening atmosphere of the 1840s than it was of Hazlitt, writing in the comparative social stability of the 1820s.^[5]

Snobbism is universally disdained wherever it is detected, inculcating a feeling of self-righteousness in those who identify themselves as free of the taint, which may bolster a sense of group solidarity, expressed as consensus.

Historical origins

Characteristically, snobs look down on people who have qualities which they regard as inferior, or flaunt their attributes which they regard as positive in order to make others seem inferior.^{[citation needed]} 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,^[6] a quote from the trade magazine The Tailor and Cutter, 1878, admits no other interpretation: "it is the correct thing to vote a showily dressed man a snob."^[7]

Thackeray's "Snobs"

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 serially in the magazine Punch, February 1846 to February 1847, and were collected and published in 1848.^[8] Thackeray's definition of snob then was: "He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob". The "mean things", Thackeray was implying, 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?"^[9]

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 quite stylish public school Charterhouse, and at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Reverse snobbery

Reverse 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 British politics, in which MPs often say things such as "I grew up on a council estate" to try to prove their common roots.

The term bourgeois is frequently used in North America among those who self-identify as working class, to describe individuals who borrow veneers of upper classes in order to affect a sophisticated, cultured image. In a related phenomenon, people who have worked to change their material lives may be accused of having "betrayed their roots".^[10]

See also

• Chronological snobbery
• Classism
• Emotional insecurity
• Narcissism
• Pedant
• Pride
• Prima donna
• Queen bee (subculture)
• School diva
• Spoiled child
• Wannabe

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?"

Etymologies

• Ask Oxford - Ask the Experts
• Merriam Webster On-line Dictionary
• On-line Etymology Dictionary