snoot, n., a really extreme usage fanatic 1
Just today, I stumbled upon a site that tickles my English appreciation bone: Language Log (Also found here, I now see). It’ll take some time to work through the archives, but I do know where my “reading breaks” (breaks from reading books and news, that is) will be for a while. A sample:
…snoots are never scholars. At least, their snootish outpourings are never based on scholarly investigation and analysis, even if they have some scholarly credentials in other aspects of their intellectual life. The reason is simple: scholarship subordinates the self, at least temporarily, to an investigation of external fact, while the snootish posture immediately asserts the primacy of the self’s linguistic judgments. Snoots routinely invoke both the authority of tradition and the dictates of logic, but these are ex post facto rhetorical justifications, not the conclusions of a dispassionate analysis.
Oh. *sigh-smile* That excerpt has just about everything to satisfy the anti-post-literate age curmudgeon in me. *heh* I don’t even care that it issues a vague, gentle, completely unintentional indictment of some of my semi-private musings on this blog. This stuff is just really fun reading. (And I intended the amphibolous construction in that sentence. :-))
Oh, to-loo, to-lay! What frabjous fun, my beamish boys n girls!
🙂
Update: one of my very favorite bugaboos, “[just] semantics”, is dealt with briefly here.
“…As a rule of thumb, you should be suspicious whenever someone who’s not professionally involved in the study of semantic variation dismisses some difference as “(just) semantic(s)” or the like; it’s likely to be a dodge, or at least a stretching of the truth… “
I grew up in a home where dinner table conversation was a test of language skills. One word changed in a sentence made all the difference in whether or not you got to laugh at a groaner joke.
That’s great, TF!