Snobs: The Classic Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues, and Yourself

by Lynes, Russell

• ISBN13: 9780061706400
• ISBN10: 006170640X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-01
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In this humorous look at the phenomenon of snobbery, Lynes begins by stating, "the social snob, while not extinct, has gone underground (except for professionals such as headwaiters and metropolitan hotel room-clerks), and snobbery has emerged in a whole new set of guises." He playfully skewers the many types that have since emerged, from Emotional Snobs to Sensual, Political, Taste, Regional, and Reverse Snobs. In vivid characterizations that run the gamut, Lynes' cutting wit brings out his contemporaries' foibles with humor and elan. Includes a number of illustrative drawings by Robert Olson.

Excerpts

Snobs
The Classic Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues, and Yourself

Chapter One

There was a time not long ago when a snob was a snob and as easy to recognize as a cock pheasant, In the days when Ward McAllister was the arbiter of Newport society and when there were precisely four hundred souls in New York worth knowing and only "nobodies" lived west of the Alleghenies, snobbishness was a nice clean-cut business that made careers for otherwise unoccupied women and gave purpose to otherwise barren lives. In those days the social order was stratified as tidily as the terracing of an Italian garden, and a man could take his snobs or leave them. But now the social snob, while not extinct, has gone underground (except for professionals such as headwaiters and metropolitan hotel room-clerks), and snobbery has emerged in a whole new set of guises, for it is as indigenous to man's nature as ambition and a great deal easier to exercise.

Snobbery has assumed so many guises, in fact, that it is, I believe, time that someone attempt to impose order on what is at best a confused situation. There are a few basic categories of snobs that seem to include most of the more common species that one is likely to encounter, or, indeed, to be. None of these categories is new; there have always been, I presume, snobs of many types, but now that the preeminence of the social variety has been submerged in a wave of political and economic egalitarianism, and now that we find ourselves in an era in which the social scientists believe that it is somehow good for us to be ticketed and classified, let us sort out the most common practitioners of the sneer.

The Intellectual Snob is of such distinguished lineage and comes from such established precedent that he is dignified by a mention in Webster's ("one who repels the advances of those whom he regards as his inferiors, as, an intellectual snob"). The other categories are less well known and less well documented. For convenience, let us call them: the Regional Snobs, the Moral Snobs, the Sensual Snobs, the Emotional Snobs, the Taste Snobs, the Occupational Snobs, the Political Snobs, and finally the Reverse Snobs or Anti-Snob Snobs. Before we examine these, we should be aware that economic and social boundaries, while they may occasionally serve as guide ropes, are on the whole unimportant in considering the various forms of condescension and the various attitudes of superiority that distinguish the true snob from the merely vain man, woman, or child.

Snobbishness, as we will use the word, implies both an upward and a downward movement—a scramble upward to emulate or outdo those whose position excels one's own, and a look downward on (or sometimes straight through) those less happily endowed than oneself. The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon. The snob is almost by definition insecure in his social (in the larger sense) relationships, and resorts to snobbishness as a means of massaging his ego. Since scarcely anyone is so secure that his ego does not sometimes need a certain amount of external manipulation, there is scarcely anyone who isn't a snob of some sort. As a matter of fact, the gods of the Greeks and the Romans were frightful snobs, morally, physically, and emotionally, and it is not uncommon for civilized peoples to worship snobbery. It is the Christian religion that promoted the virtue of humility for us, and of all the virtues it is the most difficult to come by. Let us not, then, be snobbish about snobs—at least not yet.

It is not my intention to apply the scientific method to the definition of the categories which we shall examine, though each species will be seen to have its subspecies and each subspecies to have many variants. The reader will discover in my approach certain similarities to that dark medieval yardstick, the Seven Deadly Sins, a once useful method of classifying man's shortcomings. He may also see the Four Temperaments or Humors as dominating some of the groups we look at. It will, I trust, become apparent that each snob suggests another snob, as each sin another sin, each temperament another temperament. It is not possible here either to exhaust the possibilities or even to give those we examine more than a casual nod. I mean this to be suggestive, merely a sketch that will make the reader glimpse the vast possibilities that a methodical study by a diligent social scientist might uncover.

Regional Snobs

Our first category is the Regional Snobs, commonly known in the South as Virginians, in the West as Californians, and in the East as Bostonians. This, however, should be recognized for what it is, a mere colloquialism. The Regional Snob can come from anywhere, and is readily distinguished by his patronizing attitude toward anywhere else. He lets it be known that there is no place to match the seat of his origin; indeed, he seems surprised or amused that people in other places are so much like people. The Asturians who live in the north of Spain, for example, look with special distaste on the citizens of the neighboring province, Galicia, and they have a saying that "a Galician is the animal that most closely resembles a human being." In Texas it is said that you should never ask a man where he comes from. "If he's a Texan," they say, "he'll tell you. If he's not, don't embarrass him." These are not as extreme cases as they might seem. It was recorded a decade ago that a boy who lived on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast, was assigned the problem in school of writing a composition about the then Duce of Italy. His paper started with the sentence: "Mussolini is an off-Islander."

Snobs
The Classic Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues, and Yourself. Copyright © by Russell Lynes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

---

Excerpted from Snobs: The Classic Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues, and Yourself by Russell Lynes
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.