manners downwards." It was not the deeply ingrained and fundamentally accepted idea of "one's betters" that has marked snobbery in traditional European and American culture, but "aping one's betters". Snobbery is a defensive expression of social insecurity, flourishing most where an establishment has become less than secure in the exercise of its traditional prerogatives, and thus it was more an organizing principle for Thackeray's glimpses of British society in the threatening atmosphere of the 1840s than it was of Hazlitt, writing in the comparative social stability of the 1820s. Snobbatives Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposes the term snobbative to refer to a pretentious, highfalutin phrase used by a person in order to sound snobbish. The term derives from snob + -ative, modelled upon comparatives and superlatives. Thus, in its narrow sense, a snobbative is a pompous (phonetic) variant of a word. Consider the following hypercorrect pronunciations in Israeli Hebrew: khupím is a snobbative of khofím (), which means "beaches"; tsorfát is a snobbative of tsarfát (), which refers to "France"; amán is a snobbative of omán (), which means "artist". A non-hypercorrect example in Israeli Hebrew is filozófya, a snobbative of filosófya (), which means "philosophy". The snobbative filozófya (with z) was inspired by the pronunciation of the Israeli Hebrew word by German Jewish professors of philosophy, whose speech was characterized by intervocalic voicing of the s as in their German mother tongue. See also References External links Joseph Epstein, "In a snob-free zone": "Is there a place where one is outside all snobbish concerns—neither wanting to get in anywhere, nor needing to keep anyone else out?" Etymologies Ask Oxford – Ask the Experts Merriam Webster On-line Dictionary On-line Etymology Dictionary 1820s neologisms Class discrimination High society (social class) Identity politics Labeling theory Narcissism Class-related slurs Personality traits Social status Stereotypes of the upper class Terminology of the University of Cambridge