How do you define being a Snob!

Admit I read maps for pleasure too...and dictionaries!!

I used to visit patients at home (remember those days?) and frequently couldn't find my way out of the room again

My lovely sister has no sense of direction. We were staying in an hotel once and she turned the wrong way out of the bedroom every day for two weeks.
She cannot tell left from right and as she has never driven she cannot give me directions, even if she has been to a place dozens of times.
She is also habitually late, which drives me mad. She has caused me so much cost and inconvenience by missing planes, trains and coaches that I have paid for. When I ask her why she is late, she says she had to finish painting the hall, or had to dry her hair........I have often wanted to say 'Why the bl**dy hell didn't you start sooner?' - but I don't.
I am never late, and usually arrive at airports with four hours to spare (unless Singapore Airlines makes me late for my connection!)...

In spite of her annoying ways, I love my sister dearly and I have taken her on holiday every year for the last 50 years - when I was married we used to take her and her children away as her husband was a lazy, selfish pig.
I am going to Manchester next month to bring her back with me for a holiday here. I have made all the arrangements, including assistance at the airports, hired a folding wheelchair, paid for both our flights and for a week's car hire in Manchester so I can take her for days out - all she had to do was renew her passport. What a performance - she can't find her old one so she has to get her photo counter-signed. The first lot of photos were rejected because she did not have the seat in the photo booth high enough.
Then she said she did not know any professional people to sign the new photo. She got a friend of her DIL to sign it but forgot to get the woman's passport number. The woman has gone away for a week's holiday.
I have to give her passport details to Easyjet so I won't be relaxed until she has her passport. I started asking her to renew her passport before Christmas but she said she couldn't afford it.

The trouble with being very efficient is that you have to spend your life picking up the pieces behind inefficient people!

What a lucky woman your sister is, Greatnan! I hope she appreciates you

When I did some scuba diving and was learning to use the underwater compass, one of my friends told the diving instructor that I needed a compass to go shopping!

I also read maps for pleasure, butty, but I can't hold them in my head in spite of their fascination .

jeni I also had that problem in pharmacies where I worked -reminding counter assistants taking in prescriptions that some patients did not have a 'Christian' name.
Had one older assistant who always called addressed customers as'madam'-quite inappropriate in that location.
When I asked her not to she said she had been'properly brought up and trained'!!

Why was it inappropriate, Maniac?

Were some of them men, Maniac?

Was it a brothel?

I've been in two of those, in Pompeii.
maniac you'll have to go there if you haven't been. When we're in Naples?

Maniac also worked in pharmacies for many years for a large household name where sir and madam where the by word,some times as a shy 15 year old I wasnt sure which gender I was addressing through long hair (hippy) and strange clothing ,and very 'broad' dressing .Would love to say words of wisdom how I dealt with it.....have had people over the years say I am a snob because I like to dress smartly and take care care with my appearance,have also been called a snob because I like to shop in M&S, I think snob is in perpective of the person who sees it, not in the actions of the person who does it,this may not make sense as I am not well educated and perhaps not explaining very well...plus have had a glass of wine,not a good combination ..hic...[wine grin]

You're right, nelliedeane, no one should call you a snob just because you choose to take care of your appearance (and what on earth's wrong with shopping at M&S?)! It is indeed more about the people who said those things to you and their feelings of insecurity, perhaps.

You make perfect sense, nellie. People use 'snob' as a label for people they are afraid might show them up in some way!

Hey, I shop at m&s!
Thanks to whoever it was that pointed me to their outlet. I bought 3 dresses

Jingl - let me get this straight. I have nothing against cleaners. I have worked as cleaner myself in years gone by when I needed money. If my cleaner wanted me to call her Mrs X then I would, I would also pay her above the going rate as I pay everybody well, who helps us.
No doubt you will have something to say about that - perhaps that is also being a snob, to employ people at all, never mind expecting them to call you Mrs or Mr XYZ

NO! Employing people is not being snobbish! It is helping the economy!
We actually employ the MPs as they are payed for through our taxes.
Although, sometimes I wonder?
I worked put once that the tax I paid, paid the salary of the person who taxed me in the IR!
If they sacked that person would their be any need for me to pay tax?

It was just one of those friendly neighbourhood shops where calling anyone 'madam' seemed unfriendly and distancing.
I have worked in red light areas and some very rough places e.g with over 30 methadone addicts and many colourful characters
Yes nelliedeane I do agree that sometimes the gender of customers can be uncertain.I always tried to be smartly dressed at work unlike some Sat girls who it seems had never owned a comb or an iron.Oh dear now I'm being snobby!

back to names I had most difficulty with Chinese names -knowing which way round it should be -which was 'family' name?

Snobs come in a variety of types IMO.

Having just moved out of the city suburbs to a small town my city based friends are being 'snobby' because they think I have somehow 'sold out'. They regularly make disparaging remarks about me being a 'country bumpkin' and obviously think city life is 100 times better than small town because it is less cosmopolitan and takes me 20 mins longer to get to city centre!

Well, if dressing smartly and being well made-up and with a good hair-do make you a snob, I am certainly off the hook!
I think we could have a competition along the lines of 'There were ten of us in a shoebox and we thought we was lucky'. I claim to have had as underprivileged a childhood as anyone here. Does that exonerate me from the charge of snobbishness? No, on second thoughts there are lots of people who climb up the ladder and then kick it away behind them - Margaret Thatcher? My background did make me particularly sympathetic towards the children I taught, who mainly had the same kind of home (although my parents did encourage us to read widely and listen to classical music).
I have to admit to wincing when someone exhibits amazing ignorance of things I had believed everybody would know. On the National Lottery quiz tonight, one man was asked who was assassinated on the Ides of March. He chose Franz Ferdinand. Another woman thought 'Land of My Fathers' was the Scottish national anthem. A couple on Pointless decided that Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister in 1840 - another couple thought that Neil Kinnock was a past president of the Irish Republic. Does that make me an intellectual snob?

Probably, greatnan ! I think there's a huge difference between knowledge of events that would help you win quizzes and more ethereal knowledge which is about ideas rather than facts, though facts can be useful in that field as well. I happen to think there is something called quiz knowledge. I think you probably have both kinds, which doesn't make you a snob, except when we want to tease you .

jeni There was no tiramisu anywhere in the late 1960s. It's not a traditional Italian dessert; it was invented in the 1980s.

One of the many pleasures of my visits to NZ is my daughter's tiramisu - in general I don't like sweet things, but the combination of alcohol, cream and coffee is irresistible. I might even have a go at making it myself now you have put it into my head!
Bags, I do agree about quiz knowledge. The Eggheads now treat the quiz as a job and spend many hours just learning lists. Memory is an odd, quirky, thing. I can remember reams of academic stuff from school/college days, but my sister can tell me conversations we had 40 years ago which I have entirely forgotten. (Mostly, the ones that show her in a good light!)

I found some of my teaching colleagues incredibly unsympathetic and hostile to my 'remedial' pupils,some or whom were coping with home lives that would reduce many of us to gibbering wrecks. I found one of 'my' boys selling shoes on his uncle's stall at the local market. He offered to give me a discount of 5% and he was able to quote the reduced pricesinstantly. He was convinced he was useless at maths. They could also do instant subtraction when playing darts and some could work out the odds on a treble accumulator on the dogs. They used as much as they needed of anything they learned in school. The ethos of the school, whose head had only ever worked in a highly selective Christian Brothers grammar school before, was alien to them. My biggest problem was making them see how they could use what I could teach them in their own lives. At least I managed to get a good course on health, relationships and parenting past the Chairman of the governors, Father English! (Including methods of contraception). I wish some of my patronising colleagues could have listened to the wisdom and insights that they showed in discussions on these subjects which really mattered to them.

Greatnan I'm putting up a challenge to your claim to have had as underprivileged a childhood as anyone here on the basis that your parents encouraged you to read widely and listen to classical music.

As for attitudes towards people who don't manage to retain much general knowledge, can't spell or speak properly, well one of the reasons I gave up the Guardian and struggle sometimes with Private Eye is the sniggering in both those publications by well-educated/public school types at others who have had poor/little education and who come from backgrounds where anything cultural is alien or actively discouraged.

Let's admit it, on the whole Gransnetters are a posh bunch

It's possible to become well-educated even when you come from a deprived background, as the rise of the middle class shows. Well-educated does not equal posh, nor does posh equal well-educated.I don't think it would help tomconfuse the two.

Keep hitting the m or n instead of the space bar.