Last week I received [via Sean] the joyous news that, thanks to embeddable Google Maps, no one ever need much around in javascript and the Maps API again to create their own personalized and awesome maps viewable in the comfort of their own website.

To celebrate this time-saving innovation, I immediate spent somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hours Google mapping Mary McCarthy's New York, as told in her Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938.

Now, I'll admit I like Mary's fiction much better (especially The Company She Keeps, my collegiate introduction to Mary), but there's something irresistably fascinating about the lives of authors, particularly the life of someone so likable but incomprehensible as Mary—it's impossible to understand, even in her own telling of the story, why she left Philip Rahv for Edmund Wilson.

But I mapped Mary's memoirs primarily to highlight her hyper-awareness of the socio-economic geography of New York—on the snubs, imagined or real, she felt from the "real" Village radicals for living on the Upper East Side—and also becuase they describe a New York that doesn't really exist any more, now that the Village is more expensive than the UES, among other changes.

Anyway, though, here you have it, as long as you're not using Opera, in which case the markers won't show. Enjoy:

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I always cringe when I stumble across accusations of ethnic self-hated, which generally consist of the accuser taking the acusee's words completely out of context and twisting them beyond recognition.

But what if a word hated itself? Now that would be fascinating!

Well, the word "snob" takes being an auto-antonym to a seemingly impossible extreme. While your traditional auto-antonym simply contradicts itself (by containing multitudes, Walt Whitman-style), the word snob loathes its origins more heartily than even a guilt-ridden reformed snob might.

Compact O.E.D.

You see, my Compact O.E.D. doesn't list the current use of snob until definition 3d:

One who despises those who are considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste.

Now, if for some unimaginable reason you were compelled to write in the distinctive style of dictionary definitions, how might you describe the object of a snob's scorn? As "a person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society"? As "one who has little or no breeding or good taste"?

That's precisely what I thought you'd say! And, believe it or not, those are snob's definitions 3a and 3b, respectively. Poor snob—trapped in the dictionary, one of its definitions hating two others. But how did this happen?

Well, the O.E.D. provides seemingly unrelated entries for definitions 1a ("a shoemaker or cobbler") and 1b ("the last sheep to be sheared"), but definition 2 holds some potential relevance for the self-loathing plight of snob: Apparently the word was used around the campus of Cambridge from 1796 to at least 1865 to describe (scornfully, of course), townspeople who were not studying at the university.

Thus, the "ordinary" person that definition 3a contrasts with ranked gentry could have been a synechdochal evolution of the contrast between the Cambridge locals and its supercillious students. But there's no verifying this theory, especially in light of the following:

A) The distinct possibility that the lower-class definition of snob came from an abbreviation of the Latin sine nobilitate, as AskOxford's linguistic faqs explain.

B) The implied etymology of the O.E.D.'s first citation for the ordinary-person definition of snob: In July 1831, the Lincoln Herald wrote, "The nobs have lost their dirty seats—the honest snobs have got 'em." Indeed, "nob" has a slang entry as "a person of some wealth or social distinction," and the transition from nob to its antonym snob is almost too simple.

William Thackeray

The transition from snob meaning "commoner" to snob meaning "one who hates commoners," however, is somewhat more subtle. In 1848 Willian Thackeray popularized the word snob with The Book of Snobs, which classifies a snob as "he who meanly admires mean things."

How Thackeray came to this definition is a mystery to me, but he clearly specifies that it's "a great mistake to [...] think [Snobs] exist among the lower classes merely." According to Thackeray, "A great per-centage of Snobs [...] is to be found in every rank of this mortal life" (page 3).

So there you have it. The word snob hates itself, and owes it all to Thackeray, who quite perfectly calls himself one repeatedly throughout the book that started all this etymologic self-loathing.

I recently heard a new term being bandied about the office: "deck," meaning PowerPoint presentation. After a quick google, I'm kind of surprised I've never heard it before. I'm also somewhat befuddled by its origin.

This comment on a metafilter post asking for synonyms for PowerPoint (apparently they poster was unsatisfied with "presentation") explains deck as a physical metaphor. Like, if you conceive of your slides physically they might remind you of a deck of cards. Having personally conceived of PowerPoint slides physically (through, you know, a printer), I must say I didn't find them particularly reminiscent of playing cards.

A later commenter claims that the term "deck" makes sense if you're "old-school enough to have been really into HyperCard on a Mac," an idea echoed by a comment on mamamusings and solidified by google.

Now, I can see why you'd use "deck" in reference to HyperCard (a fascinating pre-www hypermedia program)—the program, in Wikipedia's words, "was based on the concept of a "stack" of virtual "cards."" It has cards in its logo and even in its name! But how that terminology carried over to PowerPoint—with a card-free logo and name, and no immediately recognizable card-like characteristics—is a mystery to me.