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A larger, more interesting kind of snobbery based on knowledge is language snobbery. The tribe of such snobs seems to be increasing, even as they slog through solecisms and wail eloquently that the numbers of those who understand the English language are vanishing like the Mayas or Hittites. Droves of purists can be seen shuddering on every street corner when the word hopefully is misused. Their chairman of the board is NBC-TV's Edwin Newman, their chief executive officer the New York Times's William Safire. One author, the late Jean Stafford, had a sign on her back door threatening "humiliation" to anyone who misused hopefully in her house.
The snobbery of residence and place persists, although the price of housing makes it more complicated to bring off. Years ago, a Boston banker moved his family two blocks over on Beacon Hill, in the wrong direction from Louisburg Square. Mrs. Mark Anthony De Wolfe Howe, trying to be polite, remarked, "Oh yes, people are beginning to live there now, aren't they?"
Today, snobberies of residence and place can sometimes be achieved by the familiar flip into reverse snobbery. By the process of gentrification, certain snobs can pioneer in new territories (sections of Brooklyn, for example) and achieve a certain cachet of simultaneous egalitarianism and chic. Then too, there is what might be called the ostentatious plainstyle. In West Texas, for example, extremely wealthy ranchers, their oil wells serenely pumping dollars out of the range day and night, sometimes live in willfully ordinary ranch houses and get around in pickups.
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 Look, and every upstart from the suburbs was marching around looking as if he were home from Princeton for the weekend. So how were the real aristocrats to proclaim themselves? By going punk? Slam-dancing at the Harvard Club? As soon as one finds something to be snobbish about, everyone else has got hold of it, and so the central charm of snobbery, the feeling of being something special, vanishes.
The very nature of capitalism militates against a stable snobbery: the capitalist seeks the widest possible market; quality chases the dollars of the mob, but when the mob buys en masse, the illusion of quality, of specialness, vanishes. With metaphysical complexity, the makers of Lacoste shirts have understood this, and are making Lacoste shirts that have no alligator on them, stroke, spectacular instance of self-supersession. In one stroke, Lacoste has taken snobbery into another dimension.