{"id":13920,"date":"2011-12-02T17:41:18","date_gmt":"2011-12-02T22:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/12\/02\/13920.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:03:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:03:40","slug":"regarding-snobbery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/12\/02\/regarding-snobbery\/","title":{"rendered":"Regarding snobbery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger is concerned about the word snob<\/strong>. Because, one supposes, as a Very Pretentious Person, it behooves YHB to use the word in some sense that is technically correct but uncommon, and to both eschew and deprecate the common use of the word. But really, is John Scalzi even Regarding Snobbery<\/a> at all?\n

Snobbery, as I understand it, is rooted in aristocracy: a snob is someone who would rather dine with the Earl’s idiot cad of a son than with the brightest commoner in the world. Snobbery is fundamentally in opposition to merit of any kind (unless you count blood as merit, in which case, snob). Also, while snobbery expresses itself in scorn for the lower middle classes, it equally expresses itself in obsequious sycophancy among those lower middle classes to the upper classes. Snobs and nobs. Mr. Meagles from Little Dorrit<\/i> is the great example of a snob; Mr. Dickens treats it as an unfortunate affliction.\n

Of course, the idea of snobbery spreads beyond the nobility. In the United States, where there were no nobles, there was still hereditary snobbery, with the descendants of the Mayflower families taking precedence along with some others of the Best People. There was still good breeding, and if American snobs weren’t quite up to their British cousins, they still drew the line at dining with riffraff like artists and Irishmen. This kind of class-based snobbery is still surprisingly relevant among the families that care about it, although it’s broadened out to be closer to common or garden classism, rather than snobbery as such.\n

Then there are intellectual snobs. As with real snobs, an intellectual snob would rather dine with a vicious, dishonest and foul-smelling graduate of Bryn Mawr than an kind, elegant and well-groomed drop-out of Enormous State University. Or Harvard, for that matter. Intellectual snobbery is also classism, for the most part, but has at least the advantage of being relatively egalitarian#&8212;when an intellectual snob discovers that her plumber went to Bowdoin, the snob is willing to treat that plumber like an almost-equal (depending on the snob’s own alma mater).\n

Mr. Scalzi, though, is using snob<\/strong> to mean something else entirely, as far as I can tell. His description of the snob’s attitude as This stuff is awesome because I like it; this stuff sucks because I don’t; those who like the things I do not are stupid<\/i> seems to me to describe the fan<\/strong> rather than the snob. I don’t think you can be a Doctor Who<\/i> snob, for instance—there are obsessive types who know all the episodes by title, author, script editor and original air date snobs<\/i> if they look down on the rest of us and assume that we have nothing interesting or useful to say about the show, but I don’t think I would call them snobs. Nor would I call foodies food snobs<\/i>, because they are properly called foodies<\/i>. Theater snobs? Chocolate snobs? Footwear snobs? Do people use those terms? Do those of us who prefer better quality tea leaves call ourselves tea snobs?\n

This is what I’m asking: do people call themselves snobs? If they do, is it a joke? I mean, I call myself an intellectual snob fairly frequently, but it’s a joke on myself and my own weakness rather than a badge of honor. For Mr. Scalzi’s kind of snob, well, I have strong opinions about what I like and dislike, and I suppose denigrate the riffraff who like rubbish as much as the next blogger, but I wouldn’t proclaim myself a snob because of it. I think I use the term as an insult to other people (I’m not sure, as I often tune myself out) who have unreasoning prejudices, as someone who might refuse to enjoy bowling or bluegrass or bratwurst, but if I do, I’m using it as a sloppily insulting version of classist. If a Lipton-drinker called me a tea snob, I would understand what such a person was getting at, but then, I know lots of very wonderful people who drink Red Rose or even Bigelow; I wouldn’t refuse to dine with such people tho’ I might well attempt to convert them…\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger also finds a distinction between elitism and snobbery, but the note is long enough and y’all probably get it already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19466,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13920\/revisions\/19466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}