Well, let's see. The use of the term preterit has little to do with snobbery, but more to do with what native grammarians called grammatical categories like tense and aspect. When linguists use different grammatical terms, it's usually for a reason. When prescriptive grammarians (ab)use grammatical terms, they're usually not being accurate or reasonable. Great fun ensues.

Latin had a verbal system that showed traces of what linguists call tense (when an action takes place vis-a-vis the speech act, past-present-future) and aspect (whether an action was completed (perfect) or not (imperfect)).

Latin has:

present indicative active "I love, am loving"
imperfect indicative active: "I was loving"
future indicative active: "I shall love"

present perfect indicative active: "I have loved"
past perfect indicative active: "I had loved" (aka plusquam perfectum)
future perfect indicative active: "I shall have loved"

Greek, besides having a perfect, also had an aorist (French does likewise, often called the historical past for actions further back in history than just the perfect).

Old English (as well as some other Germanic languages) had something called the preterit-present, which was a verb class that were past (preterit) in form, but present in semantics. This class survives today as the modal or auxiliary verbs (e.g., can, may, etc.).

The word preterit is also an old Calvinist term that refers to those who are not saved by God's grace, and therefore damned. (All your good works can't save you now.)