What Do You Get When You Cross A Snail With A Shark?

I had never heard the word "snarky" before I worked in a book warehouse. I would like to say that this is because, being ever-so-literate, I was able to find time to peruse the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll. "The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony In Eight Fits)" owes much to his shorter piece, "Jabberwocky" in tone and silliness. But I've never read it. I was introduced to snark by the head of our order department.
For her, snarky was a an adjective used to describe the relative pleasantness of an interaction with a customer. Depending on the level of snark, one could be labelled "really snarky" to "not snarky at all." She preferred the ones who were less snarky, but she was able to deal with large doses of snark over the phone. That's how she got her job: her ablilty to deescalate snark.
Over the years since then, I have received a number of odd looks when I have used this term to describe unpleasant interactions. Imagine my chagrin when David Denby, film critic for The New Yorker, chose to write a book about snark, titled "Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation." It is his assertion that dismissive, superior, jaded discourse is becoming all too prevalent in a world that spawned TMZ.com and its antecedents. "We are in a shaky moment," Denby writes, "a moment of transition, and I think it’s reasonable to ask: What are we doing to ourselves? What kind of journalistic culture do we want? ... What kind of national conversation?"
In the past few months, we have been as fascinated by our new president's washboard abs as we have been with his policies. We have twenty-four hour news networks that feed us the same twenty-four second news bites in endless loops. It's easy to be snarky in this world. The challenge, as I learned way back when, is how we choose to deal with it.