“Q’s a terrible snob,” sighs V.

“Takes one to know one,” think I, who love them both.

And no, neither of them is you. I’ve composed Q and V, like Mister Potato Head, from familiar features borrowed from acquaintances, including the bloke in the mirror. Snob is a barb that stings. Accuse a friend and expect a squawk: “I am not!” Snobs adjudge themselves connoisseurs, people with taste, values, standards, bless their souls. Their appreciation for the best of this or that is justified, not undue, a measure of discrimination, not condescension!

I am (let’s get this over with) a snob. Allergic to snobbery, I try to hide it, but you can feel it pulsing beneath my prose. I’m snobbish about ethics, art, and literature in English. I know what’s fine and crinkle my nose at what’s not. I am not a snob about cuisine, murder mysteries or social rank because, while familiar with these categories, I don’t cherish them. I consider royals comic and celebrities palookas until proven otherwise. Wealth, for me, is a fact not a credential. A celebrant of humility, I mask my prejudices in aw-shucks geniality but don’t be fooled, I’m sniffier than I let on. I spangle my elocution with superfluous felicities, trusting you’re a snob too.

No one’s sure where our word “snob” comes from, which is funny, since snobs typically exalt ancestry. Social snobs trace their lineage to William the Great or Caligula’s horse. The Oxford English Dictionary, our lexical Debretts, rolls its eyes when it describes snob’s etymology as “originally slang, of obscure origin.” I mean, really dearie, you can’t invite snob to hobnob with peerless polysyllables, what are you thinking!

I’m all for snobbery if – and only if – it acknowledges its absurdity. No one, in any walk of life, tops the tree because, face it, there are no trees, none that matters “in the long run.”  Dickens’ Little Dorrit put this topic in mind. Among the hefty novel’s central characters is William Dorrit, “the father of the Marshalsea.” The Marshalsea was a notorious debtors’ prison. Dickens, an insufferable snob himself (“of obscure origin”), knows you can be hoity-toity anywhere. The searing satire of the book is directed, partly, at the author’s self.

Snobbery is the flipside of reverence. The snob’s rage insists that in our decadent, witless chaos of a moment, THIS MATTERS – enough to eviscerate the boobs who “don’t get it.” Jeremiah and Saint Francis were, you can be sure, ethical snobs – Jesus, too, about the Pharisees. A hostess in a snit about a misplaced fish-fork fulminates as righteously as a priest whose altar’s been pissed on. These are no joking matters. This is blasphemy, heresy, to hell with such apostates!

Snobs may be hard put to justify their ferocity. I’ve been urged to cut both MAGgots and junk book authors “slack.” “Aren’t they human too?” I’m hectored. “What makes you the Lord High Pooh-Bah?”

About ethics and prose, I know what I know. Gracelessness, cruelty, sloppiness, mendacity, swaggering, tolerance for the intolerable are not OK! They are crimes against humanity! Folks who can’t understand this live beyond the pale. May they rot!

Back in 1970, Nebraska’s Senator Hruska defended the nomination of Judge Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court with this memorable argument: "Even if (Carswell) were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos."

Contemplating the thugs and morons in today’s Congress and their nauseating maestro, I shudder. Yes, I’m a snob. We all should be.