snootyThe delightful thing about this word, twosleepy, is how it relates to one prescriptivist's proud self-designation. David Foster Wallace in his musingly rambling review of
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner (1998), reveals in a footnote that his family used the term
snoot which he defines in a footnote:
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. I refer you to Language Hat's point-by-point demolition of it (
link, scroll down a couple of screenfuls to
David Foster Wallace Demolish). But it is obvious that he does have fun playing with language.
Snootitude is a fine coinage, but I have always wondered what the criteria are by which certain neologisms are silently accepted while others are not.
