Or, if you’re in a meeting and someone offers a snarky comment about your latest idea, turn and talk to the people who seem genuinely interested. When it’s warranted say something like, “I noticed you rolled your eyes when you reminded me about that project. But they aren’t afraid to call someone out for their behavior.Ĭommit to using direct communication. They don’t feel like they have to get the last word in and they aren’t interested in arguing just for the sake of it. But they also recognize that it’s sometimes best to ignore someone who is using snarky comments just to get attention. Mentally strong people understand when to be assertive and they’re not afraid to speak up. They Know When to Speak Up And When to Shut Up Ultimately, you’ll want to be able to hold your head high and know you were able to be the bigger person. No matter how tempted you are, don’t stoop to other people’s level. Whether that means repeatedly telling themselves, “It’s important to treat others with respect,” or it means excusing themselves from situations that aren’t in line with their beliefs, mentally strong people know maintaining their integrity is the key to inner peace. Mentally strong people know their values and they make it a priority to live according to them - even when faced with snarky people. Reframe your upsetting thoughts, take deep breaths to stay calm, and walk away from the situation when it’s warranted. Or decide that you aren’t going to let your supervisor’s snide remarks affect your self-worth. Commit to making it a good day, even when your co-worker is rude. If an individual makes it a habit to spout snarky comments, decide that you’re not going to allow that individual to take up too much room in your life. ![]() And you certainly don’t want to let negative, snarky comments to influence how you feel about yourself or what type of day you’re going to have. Still, they have different roots.Allowing others to control the way you think, feel, or behave gives them power over you. It's likely that narc was influenced by nark, and that narky, snarky and sarky have influenced each other. This is why one shouldn't make assumptions about etymologies based on the apparent similarities between contemporary words. I always believed that the informer sense was based on narcotics too. But in AmE we also have narc, short for 'narcotics officer'. It comes from a sense of nark meaning 'nose'-so a nark noses around for the police. Now, I was surprised to learn that the 'police informer' sense of nark is related to this. This is derived from to nark 'annoy', hence (BrE) narked 'annoyed'. Now, a BrE speaker may be led to believe that snarky is AmE because they're more accustomed to (BrE) narky, which the OED gives as a synonym of snarky. And bad temper is getting one's nose out of joint or possibly turning one's nose up at something (and we get /sn/ in snob.). sn/ is onomatopoetic in words for nose-breathing-actions: sniff, snort, etc. I wonder if the case could be made for some sound symbolism between /sn/ and bad temper. ![]() An AmE word that comes to mind is snit, which means a little fit of bad temper. ![]() If someone's being sarcastic, it's often a symptom of bad temper, so one can see how the two have come to be linked in (some of) our minds. ![]() It means something more like 'irritable, bad-tempered' (OED). Second, it doesn't quite mean 'sarcastic', like BrE sarky, though it could readily be used of someone who was being sarcastic. AmE speakers may use it more commonly than BrE speakers these days, or it may still be regional-I don't know-but these may be reasons why Jo assumes it's AmE. It comes from the dialectal verb snark, meaning 'to snort' and also 'to nag, find fault' (which has some cognates in other Germanic languages). First, it doesn't seem to be exclusively AmE-the first OED example of it is from the very English book The Railway Children. But there are a couple of assumptions to challenge in Jo's query. (By the way, had you run into the geeky AmE "snarky" to mean sarcastic? I'd always wondered where that word had come from, and now I think I see a family resemblance.) As I said there, I love the word snarky because I find it rather evocative. In the comments for the last post, Jo asks:
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