中文词源
snob 势利眼，势利小人
词源不详，原义为修鞋匠，补鞋匠，后约于 1796 年剑桥大学学生借用该词来指小市民，小 商人，小商贩，并最终用于文学词义指势利眼，势利小人。也有俗词源解读为在 19 世纪初， 牛津和剑桥大学在普通学生的名字前面标注拉丁语 sine nobilitate,字面意思即非贵族，来自 sine,无，没有，nobilitate,贵族，词源同 noble.更为接受的说法是，标注为该拉丁语对应的法 语 sans noblesse,非贵族。
英语词源
- snob
-
snob: [18] Snob originally meant a ‘shoemaker’. Cambridge University students of the late 18th century took it over as a slang term for a ‘townsman, someone not a member of the university’, and it seems to have been this usage which formed the basis in the 1830s for the emergence of the new general sense ‘member of the lower orders’ (‘The nobs have lost their dirty seats – the honest snobs have got ’em’, proclaimed the Lincoln Herald on 22 July 1831, anticipating the new Reform Act).
This in turn developed into ‘ostentatiously vulgar person’, but it was the novelist William Thackeray who really sowed the seeds of the word’s modern meaning in his Book of Snobs 1848, where he used it for ‘someone vulgarly aping his social superiors’. It has since broadened out to include those who insist on their gentility as well as those who aspire to it. As for the origins of the word snob itself, they remain a mystery.
An ingenious suggestion once put forward is that it came from s. nob., supposedly an abbreviation for Latin sine nobilitate ‘without nobility’, but this ignores the word’s early history.
- snob (n.)
- 1781, "a shoemaker, a shoemaker's apprentice," of unknown origin. It came to be used in Cambridge University slang c. 1796, often contemptuously, for "townsman, local merchant," and passed then into literary use, where by 1831 it was being used for "person of the ordinary or lower classes." Meaning "person who vulgarly apes his social superiors" is by 1843, popularized 1848 by William Thackeray's "Book of Snobs." The meaning later broadened to include those who insist on their gentility, in addition to those who merely aspire to it, and by 1911 the word had its main modern sense of "one who despises those considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste."
权威例句
- 1. People want to buy designer labels for snob value.
- 人们想买名牌是为了满足虚荣心。
- 2. She was an intellectual snob.
- 她自以为才智高人一等。
- 3. I was a thorough little academic snob.
- 我那时是个目空一切、自以为是的小学术愤青。
- 4. Kenneth is an arrogant, rude, social snob.
- 肯尼斯是一个傲慢粗鲁只喜欢结交权贵的势利鬼。
- 5. She's such a snob!
- 她竟是这样一个势利眼！
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