I love a good dose of etymology – word origins, and how their meaning has changed over time, not to be confused with entomology, the study of bugs.  But you have to be careful.  There are lots of stories out there.  Many are not true.  Before we all had instant access to the Internet on our phones, an entire evening could be based around an easily verifiable untrue fact. You know, somebody says, “the phrase ‘SOS’ stands for ‘save our ship’.”  Sounds plausible, right?  And we’d all sit around and nod in agreement and someone would add, “yah, it replaced the old distress signal ‘CQD’ which meant ‘come quick dammit’.”

These days, someone whips out their phone, and before you know it they’re shouting you down – “untrue!  ‘SOS’ was proposed, and adopted, in 1910 as it is an easy sequence to type in Morse code ( ‧  ‧  ‧ –  –  –  ‧  ‧  ‧), then the preferred method of communication for ships at sea.”

This happened to me recently at a party.  For years as a charming amuse-bouche at gatherings where the conversation was lagging I’d been relying on the etymological fact (or so I thought) that the word ‘snob’ came from the custom of writing the abbreviation ‘s. nob.’, that is, sine nobilitate (Latin for “without nobility”), after the names of children of untitled parents at Cambridge University in England.

An officer of the fact police was on patrol nearby and soon put me in my place.  As it turns out, the word dates to the mid-18th century in England where it meant a shoemaker, or a cobbler.  After that, it began to be used as slang in Cambridge to describe townspeople or those who didn’t attend the University.  At this point, the word began to acquire a relation to social class but still was very different from how we use it now.  It was solely used to describe those who did not belong to an upper class or were not aristocratic.  Which is probably where I got my sine nobilitate anecdote.

But I was intrigued enough to go do some research and dive deeper, because today a snob is someone who effects an air of superiority in matters of knowledge or taste, and my interlocutor at the party seemed to be saying it was a lower-class or working person, so how did we get here from there?

In the 19th century, William Thackeray’s Book of Snobs provided an additional meaning to the word: those who seek to imitate and be associated with those they consider to be superior.  So, in addition to being of lower social standing, a snob was now also someone who strived to be affiliated with or regarded as upper-class.  Which is more in line with what we now consider to be a snob.

By the 20th century, yet another layer was added to the word, arriving at the meaning we now use:

snob

noun, one who tends to rebuff, avoid, or ignore those regarded as inferior

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

So in addition to being of a lower social class, and seeking to be associated with the upper-class, snobs also have the quality of regarding others as inferior, to further emphasize their exclusivity to a higher class.  And they tend to take out their phones at parties and ruin a perfectly good, albeit innocently inaccurate, conversation with their facts.  I propose a neologism for them that further clarifies the snobbishness of their 21st century snobbery: wikipediasnob.