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The word ‘snob’ is said to have arisen from the custom of
writing “s. nob.”, that is, ‘sine nobilitate,’ after the names of children of
untitled parents in certain English schools.
— Norman DeWitt, The Classical Weekly (Pittsburgh, PA), 1
Oct. 1941
“The word snob is
first recorded in the late 18th century as a term for a shoemaker or his
apprentice. At about this time it was indeed adopted by Cambridge students, but
they didn't use it to refer to students who lacked a title or were of humble
origins; they used it generally of anyone who was not a student.”
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(…) “Even an approximate age of the noun snob is beyond
reconstruction, for no citation of it predates 1776. Judging by the records, it
originated in the north of England, which neither means that it is a loan from
Scandinavian into Middle English nor makes such a conjecture improbable. Some
Scandinavian words that had been current in the north since the Vikings’ raids
reached the Standard unexpectedly late. One of them is slang, whose history,
contrary to the history of snob, has been traced in detail. The attested
meanings of snob are as following (the dates in parentheses refer to their
first known appearance in print); “shoemaker; cobbler’s apprentice” (1781); “a
townsman, anyone not a gownsman (that is, a student) in Cambridge” (1796); “a
person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society; one having no
pretensions to rank or gentility; one who has little or no breeding or good
taste, a vulgar or ostentatious person” (1838, 1859); “one whose ideas and
conduct are prompted by a vulgar admiration for wealth or social position”
(1846-1848). Snob “cobbler” is still a living word in some dialects, but most
English-speakers remember only the last-mentioned meaning.
The word snob and its
derivatives (snobbery, snobbish, snobbishness; rarely snobbism) owe their
popularity to Thackeray, who first published his essays on various snobs in
Punch and later collected them in a book. His snobs are not always vulgar and
ostentatious people: some are insufficiently refined, and their manners are
ridiculed only because of the pressure of society, which slights those whose
manners violate certain rules. A reader of older English literature may wonder
what is meant when snob turns up in the text. Long ago, an annual called The
Keepsake (the predecessor of Christmas books) was published in the United
States. In the annual for 1831, the following verse appeared: “Sir Samuel
Snob—that was his name—/ Three times to Mrs. Brown/ Had ventured just to hint
his flame,/ And twice received—a frown.” We applaud Sir Samuel’s perseverance
but would like to know why his surname was Snob. Most definitely, he was not a
cobbler. I suspect that he lacked breeding, for otherwise he would not have
accosted a married woman in such an ungentlemanly way.
Some tie connects
snob and nob. The latter has a doublet knob, and the two are often impossible
to distinguish. Among other things, nob/knob means “head.” Cobblers (“snobs”)
deal with people’s feet, not their heads, but nobs did not make hats or
bonnets. Snobs and nobs are said to have arisen among the internal factions of
shoemakers. (Here and below, I am using shoemaker and cobbler as
interchangeable synonyms, but originally the cobblers claimed control over the
soles of boots and shoes, and shoemakers over the upper leathers.) Allusions to
“two great sections of mankind, nobs and snobs” turn up occasionally in
19th-century fiction and the popular press. According to an 1831 newspaper
statement (again 1831!), “the nobs have lost their dirty seats—the honest snobs
have got ‘em.” A hundred years ago, in British provincial English a
strikebreaker, or scab, as such an individual is known in the United States,
was called knobstick, blacknob, knob, and nob. Here “nobs” are again
represented as dishonest. Although in regional speech the sound s– is often
added to all kinds of words (hence the secondary bond between slang and
language, for example), nothing suggests that the etymon (source) of snob is
nob, with s– prefixed to it. Both snob and cobbler contain the group -ob-, but
this coincidence is probably of no importance either.
It does not follow
that “cobbler” is the original meaning of snob because it is the earliest one
in our texts. More likely, the starting point was “a vulgar person,” with
“cobbler” chosen as the epitome of vulgarity. Students at Cambridge must have
had that connotation in mind when they, the gownsmen, showed their contempt to
the townsmen. At Eaton and Oxford, townsmen were called cads. Cad is a
shortening of cad(d)ee, that is, of caddie “cadet” (cadet is a French word),
and it meant “an unbooked passenger on a coach; assistant to a coachman;
omnibus conductor; confederate,” in dialects also “the youngest of a litter; an
odd-job man” before it acquired the meaning “townsman” and “an ill-bred
person.” Cobblers and their apprentices are no more “vulgar” than conductors
and their assistants.
The question is why
snob, whatever its age and provenance, came to designate a person deficient in
breeding and how it was coined. In the Germanic languages, the consonantal
group sn– is sound symbolic, and in this respect it shares common ground with
gl– (which often turns up in words for “glitter” and “glow”) and sl– (which is
frequent in words for “slime” and things slovenly and sleazy). Initial sn–
occurs in numerous words designating cutting (compare snip, snap, and snub) and
sharp objects, including “nose” (compare snout) and its functions (compare
sneeze, snooze, snort, sniff, and snuff). Among the Scandinavian words
resembling snob, especially prominent are a few meaning “fool, dolt, idiot,”
but they have the structure sn-p. The connection between cutting/snapping/
sniffing and stupidity is not immediately obvious, but one can be called a fool
for so many reasons that guessing would be unprofitable. People may have called
the sn-p man a fool because he was of stunted growth (“snubbed” by nature) or
had an ugly “snout.” A snotty person produces too much mucus in his nose, but
snotty is also “arrogant, supercilious.” Perhaps snotty “arrogant” is a variant
of snooty “snouty,” unrelated directly to snot; however, one cannot be certain.
Old Icelandic snotr “clever, wise” has cognates in other Germanic languages and
continued into Modern Icelandic (snotur). The etymology of snotr remains a
matter of debate. In any case, a person who has a sensitive nose smells things
others miss and becomes clever in the process. In historical semantics, as in
life, the distance between “wise” and “stupid” is short.
Welcome to the sn-club. Snob belongs to it, but its origin
is partly obscure. When it emerged, it seems to have designated a person whose
social status was low. Although, apparently, a northern word, snob does not
sound exactly like any Scandinavian noun or verb and could be coined on English
soil. It correlates with nob but was not derived from it, and its association
with cobblers is more or less fortuitous. Snob may be a cognate of snub, but
their kinship does not explain how it was coined. According to a legend, whose
earliest version was offered in 1850, snob is an abbreviation of either s(ine)
nob(ilitate) or s(ub) nob(ilitate). Allegedly, those words were written in the
matriculation documents at either Cambridge or Oxford, or Eaton if a graduate was
not an aristocrat. This legend, as Skeat, himself a long-time professor at
Cambridge, put it, is a poor joke.”
Snob Before and After Thackeray
MAY 14TH 2008
By Anatoly Liberman
------------------------------------------------------------
“No one knows why we used to call shoemakers snobs, although
it seems fairly clear that this meaning was the first one intended by this word,
beginning in the early to mid-18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary has
evidence indicating that the word was next used in Cambridge University slang
by the end of that century, to refer to a denizen of the town, rather than of
the college.
By the 1830s snob had
taken on meanings that were directly related to class, but not in the way that
we use it today. This early 19th century sense was “a person not belonging to
the upper classes; one not an aristocrat.” In the middle 19th century the word
took on the meaning of “one who blatantly imitates, fawningly admires, or
vulgarly seeks association with those he regards as his superiors.”
He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob—perhaps that is
a safe definition of the character.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs, 1848
I’ll teach you how to
behave to your superiors, you condescending snob of an aristocrat.
— Maude Howe, ”Phillida,” in The Ladies’ Home Journal
(Philadelphia, PA), May 1890
Finally, by the beginning of the 20th century snob had come
to be used to mean “one who tends to rebuff the advances of those he regards as
inferior; one inclined to social exclusiveness.”
He was in trade, he
said, and was proud of it. He was an American through and through, and there
was not an inch of the snob about him.
— The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), 11 Jan. 1901
And I had never been a snob about birth or position or money
or even intellect, perhaps not even about breeding. I have always had friendly
relations with tradespeople and servants.
— Abby Meguire Roach, The Louisville Courier-Journal
(Louisville, KY), 28 Dec. 1919
If you can transform
that story of snob into the sort of anecdote that crushes in polite company,
more power to you. Or you could look for an etymological anecdote which has not
yet been debunked; there are a few of them out there still.
Merriam-Webster: proudly ruining your chit-chat since 1843.
Why Were Shoemakers 'Snobs'?
The word wasn't always so hifalutin.”
Keeping Up Appearances
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