CALL ME SNAKE

Two years ago, I wrote a post called “I HATE SNARKY,” which expressed my strong dislike for said adjective. “Call me a stick-in-the-mud, call me a curmudgeon, call me a jabbernow, but I hate the word ’snarky,’” I argued in April 2005. “I don’t know what it means and don’t want to know, though I sense it’s popular in ‘cyber’ circles…”

Well that was then and this is now. And now, in 2007, I still hate the term though I don’t think about it much. But I was reminded of it earlier this week when, out of the blue, I received a comment to that 2005 post from a “Random Internet Person” from Sacramento. His comment (I think it’s a him, though maybe I’m wrong) was good enough to warrant a coveted “Celebrity Guest Comment.” So Random Internet Person, whoever you may be, the balcony is now open. And the “conch” is now yours.

RANDOM INTERNET PERSON speaks: “You are way ahead of me. I have been hating this word only since about the middle of 2006. That’s when it seems to have burst on to the scene here in Sacramento. Mostly it’s on blogs, but it’s found its way into the newspaper.

“Mostly, I’ve found that, in the papers, it is used by the “society-type” reporters. The ones that report on the bar scene, the restaurant scene and the local media scene. I get the sense that they are very conscious of their own use of the word and that they congratulate themselves for being so hip when they throw it into a column. Sometimes I think that they sit around and create whole stories just so they can fit in that word.”