Why Snob?
SIR.—It may interest your correspondent Mr. Cecil Roberts that in 1916 I was given the same explanation of the origin of the word " snob " as he had from his informant, with the difference that I was told it was a contraction of the Latin sine nobilitate and not of the Italian. The source of my information was Dr. Karl Liitgenau, a scholar of some repute, linguist, historian and incidentally one of the first Social-Democrat members of the German Reichstag in the 1890s, a man in short whose explanations I always accepted without questioning. My surprise, there- fore, on looking up the word one day, first in a German and then in an English dictionary, and finding there an entirely different derivation, was considerable. Surely It would not be reasonable to assume that the same explanation from two such different sources was based on noating more than clever men's plNying at anagrams and accidentally arriving at the same result ? I should indeed be glad if any light could be thrown on the subject.—I am, Sir, yours, ARNOLD BENDER. Noah's Ark, Over Haddon, Bakewell, Derbyshire.
Previous page
