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Snob is a pejorative term for a person who feels superior due to their social class, education level, or social status in general;De Botton, A. (2004), Status Anxiety. London: Hamish Hamilton it is sometimes used especially when they pretend to belong to these classes. The word snobbery came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s.
Snobbery existed also in medieval feudal Europe when the clothing, manners, language, and tastes of every class were strictly codified by customs or law. Geoffrey Chaucer, a poet moving in the court circles, noted the provincial French spoken by the Prioress among the Canterbury Tales:
And French she spoke full fair and fetisly
After the school of Stratford atte Bowe,
For French of Paris was to her unknowe.
William Rothwell notes "the simplistic contrast between the 'pure' French of Paris and her 'defective' French of Stratford atte Bowe that would invite disparagement".Rothwell, "Stratford Atte Bowe re-visited" The Chaucer Review, 2001.
Snobbery surfaced more strongly as the structure of the society changed, 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.
Snobbery 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 more 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.See: Ray 1955:25f.
A non-hypercorrect example in Israeli Hebrew is filo zófya, a snobbative of filo sófya (), which means "philosophy". The snobbative filo zófya (with z) was inspired by the pronunciation of the Israeli Hebrew word by German Jewish professors of philosophy, whose speech was characterized by intervocalic voicing of the s as in their German language mother tongue.
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