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Wonder if you could hold your own at a $1,200-a-plate dinner with a $300 wine tasting?

It might help to have in your purse or jacket pocket "The Food Snob's Dictionary: The Essential Lexicon of Gastronomical Knowledge."

The $12.95 Broadway Books paperback, which goes on sale next week, is the work of David Kamp, who, surely you must know, wrote "The United States of Arugula," and Marion Rosenfeld.

Mr. Kamp, who previously co-wrote dictionaries for film snobs and rock snobs, co-describes a food snob as "someone who has taken the amateur epicure's admirable zeal for eating and cooking well to hollandaise-curdling extremes."

The dictionary, its introduction continues, "has been developed to function as both a defensive aid in dealing with such a person and as a primer for aspiring Snobs who wish to lord their knowledge over others."

And so the authors continue to wield their skewers, through a brief history of modern food snobbery, and into food terms and personalities, from All-Clad ("Pennsylvania-based cookware manufacturer whose signature stainless-steel pots and pans have long been coveted by Food Snobs ...) to yuzu ("Japanese citrus fruit ... now being abused willy-nilly by Western chefs ...")

The book does yield some tasty yucks as it breaks down trendy terms such as "artisanal" and "farmstead," and can teach a few things, too. Deglazing? "Opaque chefspeak term for the simple process of adding liquid (usually wine, water, or stock) to a pan in which meat has been cooked, and then using a spatula or similar implement to pry loose the caramelized juices and bits of meat at the bottom of the pan, otherwise known -- Snob bonus points! -- as the fond."

There's even an entry (that capitalizes words defined elsewhere in the book) on "Keller, Thomas," who was in town last week to cook the pricey James Beard Foundation dinner:

"[He] carries a mystique that has inspired bouts of we-are-not-worthy genuflection by food writers, though his genial FRONT OF THE HOUSE and eccentric bill of fare ... convey a great deal more humor and warmth than that of ALICE WATER'S Chez Panisse."