‘This is interesting, darling,’ my husband called out from beside his whisky while I was doing the washing-up. The interesting thing was in a short black-and-white film made by John Betjeman for television in 1968 and now on BBC iPlayer called Contrasts: Marble Arch to Edgware. The camera showed him in the bare interior of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner turned into a little police station. I felt one ahead on this, as I had since been up the arch, for the sake of the view, mostly. I remembered from an exhibition there that the name of the police station cat had been Snooks.
With Snooks in mind, I jumped a little when I read in the paper about ‘Germany cocking a snoot at Brussels’. A snoot? Could that be right?
There is such a thing as a snoot, as Lord Snooty and his Pals could confirm. Snooty people have their noses or snoots in the air. Snoot, it seems, is a variant of snout. Before being used of Concorde, droop-snoot was applied in 1945 to the American P-38 Lightning and in 1955 to the British supersonic Fairey Delta 2.
Iona and Peter Opie, in their 1950s work The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, also record snooty in the sense ‘easily irritated’, but I wonder if that wasn’t a confusion with snotty.
Yet in cocking a snook, the nose is merely the starting point. Theodore Hook described the gesture in 1836 in one of his novels: ‘She proceeded to place her two hands extended in a right line from the tip of her nose.’ But this gesture, which we’d call cocking a double snook, he called taking a double sight. I wonder if this derived from nautical navigation with a sextant.
Anyway, taking a sight came and went in the 19th century, while cocking a snook endured. It has become a set phrase and, in idiomatic usage, a snook can only be cocked. The optional wiggling of the fingers gives it extra bite. But be prepared to run.
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