What's the difference between smarmy and snobbish?

Smarmy


Definition:

Example Sentences:

  • (1) I didn’t go to Eton and get all that smarmy, charming education, I’m afraid.
  • (2) From someone junior at work, “nice dress” can be smarmy; from someone senior, it can be faintly pervy.
  • (3) Pardew has been sent from the touchline and will be in huge trouble for this - a manager with a history of touchline bust-ups against assorted opposite numbers and officials, his usual smarmy post-match apology is highly unlikely to save his bacon this time.
  • (4) After the United Nations reports on war crimes , the supply of Australian vessels to the Sri Lankan Navy to prevent the departure of people who want to escape, and the revelation that a former Sri Lankan military officer was overseeing the interment of Tamil asylum seekers on Manus Island, there was something about the smarminess of the exchange in that picture that caused me additional disgust and embarrassment.
  • (5) Or smarmy seducers wanting the fancy food as close to the bedroom as possible without the expense of a hotel.
  • (6) So the radio spot takes the form of a mock game show, voiced by a smarmy-sounding host who goes under the moniker of Wink Taxandspend (hilarious!).
  • (7) She's very warm but not smarmy, she's never impolite, she has the openness of someone who is never expecting high office – which she isn't, apparently, due to those pesky grammar schools.
  • (8) The Welsh secretary, Peter Hain, said: "We must not behave as if a Tory win is inevitable," and argued that unless the party picked itself up "we might as well wrap conference up now, go home and wait for David Cameron to give that smarmy smile of his from the steps of No 10".

Snobbish


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to a snob; characteristic of, or befitting, a snob; vulgarly pretentious.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As a true Blairite, Jowell rejected such “snobbish” attacks on the free market in rigged odds.
  • (2) The Olympics showed that there are sports stars out there who have personalities, which I expect some people were quite snobbish about.
  • (3) It is snobbish and condescending to mock any creative or practical manual work.
  • (4) He compared the manner of Nick Clegg , the former Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister, with that of Cameron, saying Clegg had an “inbred arrogance (from no less a privileged background than Cameron, though seeming less snobbish because he went to Westminster instead of Eton).” Hillary Clinton intervened in row over Ken Loach’s film festival boycott call Read more One email, written while coalition talks were still going on , said the senior Labour politician Peter Mandelson was playing a “cynical double game” in an attempt to become foreign secretary.
  • (5) "Foodie" has now pretty much everywhere replaced "gourmet", perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination – even though those qualities are rampant among the "foodies" themselves.
  • (6) I worked very hard over the years not to be in thrall to attitudes that were confining or snobbish.
  • (7) And like both of them, he is a very good if perhaps underrated writer (by which I mean that it’s easy for literary types to be snobbish about novels that read so smoothly), his imagination always turning outwards, where it fixes with apparent ease on some extraordinary new subject.
  • (8) And Graham Greene of course – I have enormous regard for everything he wrote, and just by talking about films he illuminated the medium and the art and he was marvellously un-snobbish about popular culture.
  • (9) He said: “His sneering and snobbish verbal assault says it all about the elite that run this country and their attitude towards the working classes that they expect to transport them.
  • (10) He said that James's criminals were far removed from "the reality on the streets of south London" and rounded on the Crime Writers Association as "snobbish and stuffy" thanks largely to her and those like her.
  • (11) I think we are very snobbish in London about condemning people for the colloquial language they use, particularly if it’s not meant with really unpleasant intent.
  • (12) The Front National has already begun attacking Fillon as a snobbish, political has-been.
  • (13) Read's austere outlook has been variously characterised – by friends as much as anyone – as "snobbish", "priggish" and "too obviously born to the purple".
  • (14) "Landlords can't afford to be snobbish about a tenant that is successful," Saunders said.
  • (15) The Daily Mail editor (and Associated Newspapers editor-in-chief) used a rare public speech at the beginning of the year to accuse the "snobbish" BBC of a "kind of cultural Marxism", stifling political debate and failing to represent the views of its conservative viewers.
  • (16) Photograph: Murdo MacLeod Paired with Felicity Kendal as his wife, Barbara, and pitted against their formidable, snobbish neighbour Margo Leadbetter (Penelope Keith) and her docile husband, Jerry (Paul Eddington), he gave one of the classic good-natured comedy sitcom performances of our time.
  • (17) And it was incredibly snobbish, and absolutely not the case that somehow the working classes are incapable of understanding satire.
  • (18) In one of the wonderful Reith lectures Perry gave last year , he concluded that today’s art establishment is something of a dictatorship, simpering about the avant garde, snobbish towards the middle ground.
  • (19) As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to impact the 2016 presidential campaign , the Pulitzer prize-winning cultural critic’s often painful personal critique, Negroland – the title refers to the “snobbish”, middle-class, light-skinned African American world she grew up in during her childhood in Chicago – is a powerful historical lens through which to read the current state of “ respectability politics ”.
  • (20) He liked to study both sides of every conflict and “perhaps because I admired two parents who had diametrically opposed characteristics, the theme of my journalism was often one of reconciliation or of synthesis or simply of relatedness.” He saw the paper as “an extended conversation with the readers, always intellectually lively but never snobbish, exclusive or insiderish”.