If your best friend tells you that you have become a Snob, it means that you have become condescending and you like to think that you are better than everyone else.
Snob has a funny story. It was used as slang for "shoemaker," then " common person," and then it came to mean "someone who doesn't have a fancy college degree," and then it started to mean "people who liked to pretend they have degrees, who they are generally fancy and look down on ordinary people, like shoemakers. "Today, snobbish is not just for people with false pretenses. The rich people who despise people with less good taste are also snobs.
People often claim that this word originated as a shortened form of the Latin phrase "sine nobilitate" which means "without nobility" (that is, "from a humble social background ").
Several accounts have been presented in which this abbreviation was allegedly used: in lists of names of Oxford or Cambridge students, in lists of ships' passengers (to ensure that only the best people dined at the captain's table); on guest lists to indicate that no title was required when advertised.
The theory is ingenious but highly unlikely. The word snobbish is first recorded in the late 18th century as a term for a shoemaker or his apprentice. Around this time it was adopted by Cambridge students, but they did not use it to refer to students who lacked a degree or were of humble origin; it was generally used by anyone who was not a student.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the snob was used to designate an uneducated person, both the honest workers who knew their place, and the vulgar social climbers who copied the customs of the upper classes. Over time, the word came to describe someone with an exaggerated respect for high position or wealth who looks down on those considered socially inferior.
The phrase "sine nobilitate" may well have appeared in one context or another, but it is difficult to see why this word would have resulted for a shoemaker.
