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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 affectation 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.
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Encyclopedia
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 affectation 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 he or she aspires, but does not yet belong, and to which he or she may never belong (wealthy, famous, intellectual, beautiful, aryan, etc).
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. 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. citation needed/February 2009
- "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
See also
External links
- : "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
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