Bryan Garner, the editor-in-chief of Black's Law Dictionary and author of Oxford's Modern American Usage, is featured along with Justice Antonin Scalia in The New Yorker News Desk's "Writing With Antonin Scalia, Grammar Nerd." Both men are grammar nerds, or SNOOTS. On the present Court, the post says, only one other Justice qualifies, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but, according to Justice Scalia, she’s “too polite.”
In an iconic piece in Harper's worth the price of subscription, David Foster Wallace described the community of SNOOTS:
The relevant Choir here comprises that small percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of double modals and ergative verbs. The same sorts of people who watched Story of English on PBS (twice) and read W. Safire's column with their half-caff every Sunday. The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE — 10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate. There are lots of epithets for people like this — Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police. The term I was raised with is SNOOT. The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A SNOOT can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it.
Exactly.
