A Good Snob Nowadays Is Hard to Find

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Snobbery is always preposterous but also sometimes useful. "The use of forks at table," observes the English writer Jasper Griffin, "seemed to our Tudor ancestors the height of affectation, so, the 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."

— By Lance Morrow

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