Originally Posted By: zmjezhd
snooty


 Quote:
SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer's nuclear family's nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Satire's column's prose itself. This reviewer's family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for "Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance" or "Syntax Nudniks of Our Time" depended on whether or not you were one. [David Foster Wallace, "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" in Harper's Magazine, April 2001 (link).]


There is much that Wallace gets wrong in this piece....


Including his two references to William Safire.