Origin and history of snotty

late 14c., snotte, from Old English gesnot "nasal mucus," from Proto-Germanic *snuttan (source also of Old Frisian snotta, Middle Low German and Middle Dutch snotte, Middle Low German snute), from the same base as snout (q.v.). Old English had also a verb snite "wipe or pick one's nose." The meaning "despicable person" is from 1809. Snot-rag "pocket handkerchief" is by 1886.

"proud, arrogant," attested 1900 in columns of the Toronto Star newspaper, in U.S. publications by 1901 (Detroit); in 1918 it was noticed among U.S. college slang, from snoot (n.) + -y (2). Perhaps with echoes of snouty "insolent, overbearing" (1858). The notion is perhaps that in the image of "looking down one's nose" at someone or something. Also compare extended sense of snotty. Related: Snootily; snootiness. Variant snooty-nosed is attested by 1914, perhaps pleonastic ("nosy-nosed").

very common adjective suffix, "full of, covered with, or characterized by" the thing expressed by the noun, Middle English -i, from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga-, from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic). Germanic cognates include Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs.

It was used from 13c. with verbs (drowsy, clingy), and by 15c. with other adjectives (crispy). Chiefly with monosyllables; with more than two the effect tends to become comedic.

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Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets after the loss of grammatically empty but metrically useful -e in late Middle English. Verse-writers adapted to -y forms, often artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain" (and the huge plain would have been a metrical balk).

After Coleridge's criticism of it as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to make it work, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest.

Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Vasty survives, he writes, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regards as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted shorter forms.