Word: snob
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...true snob is a complex character. He is not merely a status seeker in Vance Packard's sense of the term, or a simple showoff. (Still, touches of artful swank are essential-the polo mallet cast casually onto the back seat of the car, or the real, working buttonholes on jacket sleeves that betray the Savile Row suit.) The authentic snob shows it by his attitude toward his superiors and his inferiors. Gazing upward, he apes and fawns and aspires to a gentility that is not native to him; looking down, he snubs and sniffs and sneers at those...
Snobbery has traditionally been founded on 1) birth; 2) knowledge or pseudo knowledge, or merely self-assured ignorance, all of them amounting to the same thing in snob terms; 3) access to power, status, celebrity; 4) circumstances, such as the place one lives or even the things one does not do, such as watch television...
Snobbery today tends to be fragmented. The snobbery based on knowledge is particularly specialized. A person who is otherwise completely unpretending and unimpressive may do some reading and become, for example, a wine snob; he will swirl and sniff and smell the cork and send bottles back and otherwise make himself obnoxious on that one subject. Another person may take up, say, chocolate, and be able to discourse absurdly for an hour or two on the merits of Kron over Godiva. This kind of snobbery based upon a narrow but thorough trove of expertise is a bit depressing, because...
...Being a snob of any kind is some times more difficult now. In a society of high discretionary capital and instantaneous communications, the snob and recherché effects tend to be copied and even mass-produced with stunning speed. For generations, much of America's old money walked around wearing beat-up crew-neck sweaters that had been around from St. Mark's or New Haven; the khakis were always a little too short, ending just at the ankles, and there were Top-Siders without socks. And so on. Then this came to be known as the Preppie...
...first to follow that Italian custom doubtless did so, in large part, to impress their neighbors with their sophistication. Evolution itself is a process of rising above one's origins and one's station." The writer Sébastien Chamfort located what is surely the ultimate snob, a nameless French gentleman: "A fanatical social climber, observing that all round the Palace of Versailles it stank of urine, told his tenants and servants to come and make water round his château...