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The word "snob" has been much in the news lately -- which prompted me to wonder about its origins and history.

Apparently, according to the Oxford University Press, the word was first recorded in the late 18th century as a term for a shoemaker or his apprentice.

By the end of the century, it had been adopted by Cambridge University students, who used it to refer to townspeople or local merchants who were not enrolled in the university and then more widely for people "of the ordinary or lower classes" -- more or less the opposite of today's meaning.

According to one Aodh de Blacam, who penned a Short History of Snobbery, in 1940, it was the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (best known for the 2004 movie Vanity Fair starring Reese Witherspoon) who gave the word its modern meaning in his "Book of Snobs" (1848).

"An immense percentage of Snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of Snobs: to do so shows that you are yourself a Snob. I myself have been taken for one," Thackeray writes in his introduction.

He goes on to elucidate the many different varieties of snobs -- the royal snob, the town snob, the country snob, the military snob, the clerical snob and others. The word soon passed in French (le snobisme) and German (der Snob).

Today we have the wine snob, the beer snob, the cheese snob, the opera snob, the film snob and countless other varieties. One definition of the food snob that amused me is "a person who looks down on those who do not know the difference between a daube and a navarin."

For those few readers who do not know, the former is made with slow-cooked beef, the latter with slow-cooked lamb.

According to the BBC, "Garden snobbery has been with us since the medieval queens imported exotic herbs in the 14th century. Gardens have always been places for a show of wealth and power and, of course, demonstrations of one's good taste and superior class." That seems a particularly British form of snobbery.

Here in the United States, I guess we have "lawn snobs" (people who look down on their neighbors whose grass is less green and lush and weedless than their own) and its opposite, "eco-lawn snobs" (those who look down on neighbors who waste precious dollars by pouring gallons of poisonous substances on their grass in order to create a fake and toxic perfection).

Read this article:
Alan Elsner: You Callin' Me a Snob? The History of a Word