Word Sniper

Oh wow! He's got a new blog template! Yes. I do. It looks way better.
I also have a new problem - all my posts have different fonts. This is due to my obsession with picking the font every time. From now on, I'm going with the default Blogger font because right now my older posts look like madness.

Today I'm going to try something new. I'm going to attack TWO words at one time.
"How can he do that?" you ask. Easily. It doesn't take that long at all really.
I have to send a so-called "shoutout" to my Dad and Danielle Simpson for giving me the ideas for these two words - kin and snarky.

Kinship came up in a phone conversation with my Dad and snarky, well Danielle, one of my classmates at Centennial, wanted to know its origin.

I'm surprised by the fact that kinship is actually a relatively new word and wasn't heard until the mid-1830s, according to etymonline.com. However, the word kin stretches wayyyyy further back into history. In Old English, kin was spelled cynn and meant roughly the same thing as it does today - to be family or related by blood or marriage. Dutch and German have remarkably similar words - kunne and kind. Kin is ultimately a word that comes to us from Latin, Greek and possibly even earlier. The Latin word genus, which is now one of the classifications of biological organisms, originally meant birth or race.
Now, my thoughts on kinship - we're all kin. Aww, isn't that nice?

On to "snarky", which is a word I frequently use to describe myself at any time earlier than 10 a.m.
Okay, after doing some research, I can tell you this one is short and sweet. Meaning irritable or short-tempered, snarky first appears as an adjective in 1906. Snark, a verb meaning "to snort", entered English about 40 years earlier, and is remarkably similar to the Low German word "snarken". Apparently this is one of those rare words that appeared as the result of the word imitating a non-verbal sound, like buzz or hiss. The best writing I found while rooting around the net for the origin of this weird word is this excerpt from London's The Guardian newspaper:

"And few groups of words are as useful for verbal snipers, those who sneer, snap and snarl, who resort to the snide, sniffy, snarky, snooty and snotty, as those which begin with an s and an n. That is not to say that all belong exclusively to the world of vituperation. Snug and snuggle are cosy agreeable concepts."

I love sn-words. Seeing as how I'm a verbal sniper. Ohhhh, so lame.

Can you think of any other nasty or nice words beginning with the letters s and n? Or, if you can't think of new words without looking in the dictionary, why don't you tell me, and everyone else reading my blog, the most snarky thing you've ever done?