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For the 1960s British Rock band, see The Snobs.
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. Snobbery does not exist in mediaeval feudal aristocratic Europe, when the clothing, manners, language and tastes of every class were strictly codified by customs or law. Snobbery appeared when the structure of the society changed, (after 1789) and the bourgeoisie had the possibility to imitate aristocracy. Snobbery appears when elements of culture are perceived as belonging to an aristocracy or elite, and some people (the snobs) feel that the mere adoption of the fashion and tastes of the elite or aristocracy is sufficient to include someone in the elites, upper classes or aristocracy. 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] The English novelistBulwer-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.
[edit] Historical originsCharacteristically, 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. The once popular etymology of snob as a contraction of the Latin phrase sine nobilitate ("without nobility") is now discredited.[6] [edit] 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.[7] 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.
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. [edit] See also
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[edit] Etymologies |
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