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snob [snob 词源字典]: snob: [18] Snob originally meant a ‘shoemaker’. Cambridge University students of the late 18th century took it over as a slang term for a ‘townsman, someone not a member of the university’, and it seems to have been this usage which formed the basis in the 1830s for the emergence of the new general sense ‘member of the lower orders’ (‘The nobs have lost their dirty seats – the honest snobs have got ’em’, proclaimed the Lincoln Herald on 22 July 1831, anticipating the new Reform Act).

This in turn developed into ‘ostentatiously vulgar person’, but it was the novelist William Thackeray who really sowed the seeds of the word’s modern meaning in his Book of Snobs 1848, where he used it for ‘someone vulgarly aping his social superiors’. It has since broadened out to include those who insist on their gentility as well as those who aspire to it. As for the origins of the word snob itself, they remain a mystery.

An ingenious suggestion once put forward is that it came from s. nob., supposedly an abbreviation for Latin sine nobilitate ‘without nobility’, but this ignores the word’s early history.
[snob etymology, snob origin, 英语词源]
-ae: occasional plural suffix of words ending in -a, most of which, in English, are from Latin nominative fem. singular nouns, which in Latin form their plurals in -ae. But plurals in -s were established early in English for many of them (such as idea, arena) and many have crossed over since. Now it is not possible to insist on purity one way or the other without breeding monsters.
asseverate (v.): 1791, from Latin asseveratus, past participle of asseverare "to affirm, insist on, maintain," from ad- "to" (see ad-) + severus "serious, severe" (see severe). Related: Asseverated; asseverating.
dun (v.): "to insist on payment of debt," 1620s, perhaps related to dunnen "to sound, resound, make a din" (c. 1200, dialectal variant of din), or shortened from dunkirk (c. 1600) "privateer," a private vessel licensed to attack enemy ships during wartime, from Dunkirk, French port from which they sailed. The oldest theory traces it to a Joe Dun, supposedly a London bailiff famous for catching defaulters. Related: Dunned; dunning. As a noun from 1620s.
marijuana (n.): 1918, altered by influence of Spanish proper name Maria Juana "Mary Jane" from mariguan (1894), from Mexican Spanish marihuana, of uncertain origin.
Marijuana ... makes you sensitive. Courtesy has a great deal to do with being sensitive. Unfortunately marijuana makes you the kind of sensitive where you insist on everyone listening to the drum solo in Iron Butterfly's 'In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida' fifty or sixty times. [P.J. O'Rourke, "Modern Manners," 1983]
snob (n.): 1781, "a shoemaker, a shoemaker's apprentice," of unknown origin. It came to be used in Cambridge University slang c. 1796, often contemptuously, for "townsman, local merchant," and passed then into literary use, where by 1831 it was being used for "person of the ordinary or lower classes." Meaning "person who vulgarly apes his social superiors" is by 1843, popularized 1848 by William Thackeray's "Book of Snobs." The meaning later broadened to include those who insist on their gentility, in addition to those who merely aspire to it, and by 1911 the word had its main modern sense of "one who despises those considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste."