What it means
Snottsdale is what Tempe, Mesa and west Phoenix call Scottsdale, and it means exactly what it sounds like: rich, snobby and pleased with itself. You will hear it from a bartender in Tempe when you say where you are staying, from a Mesa cousin when you mention the price of brunch, and from Scottsdale residents themselves, who have long since taken the word over and use it the way New Yorkers use “the Upper East Side,” with a shrug that is half apology and half brag.
The target is specific. The joke is aimed at North Scottsdale, with its gates and golf memberships, and at the Old Town bar district on a Saturday night, not at the 1960s ranch houses of the south side, whose residents will cheerfully agree that the snobs live a few miles up Scottsdale Road. The relocation guide is the honest version of what the word is pointing at: a city that is expensive, well kept and aware of both facts.
Where you’ll meet it
Any conversation about where to live in the Valley. Sports-radio banter. Comment sections under Arizona Republic stories about Scottsdale council votes. The word rarely appears in print without quotation marks, and never in anything the city publishes.
Where the word came from
Nobody has claimed this one, which is understandable. The pun is obvious enough that it was probably invented a dozen times in a dozen bars once Scottsdale started selling itself as the Valley’s expensive address, which the Chamber of Commerce had been doing in one register or another since The West’s Most Western Town in 1947. No newspaper recorded a first use, and the word was already common currency when it had its national moment.
That moment came in April 2006. MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16” opened its third season with the birthday party of Marissa Leigh Dubowy, a Scottsdale teenager, thrown at a Camelback Mountain mansion with a performance by the singer Frankie J, multiple outfit changes and two cars among the gifts; press accounts put the cost above $50,000. Viewers loathed it, and the city’s name came attached. On July 23, 2006, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson ran a story under the headline “Exclusivity leads to image problem for ‘Snottsdale,’” reporting that the episode, along with a short-lived CBS reality show and a porn star’s purchase of a local strip club, had made the nickname national shorthand for a city that had positioned itself as an exclusive enclave of resorts, golf and celebrity homeowners. Rick Kidder, then president of the Scottsdale Area Chamber of Commerce, gave the quote that summed up the problem: “Suddenly that’s what we’re famous for.”
The marketers never recovered the word, so the residents took it. Two decades on, AZ Big Media’s 2026 guide to Arizona slang listed Snottsdale alongside “haboob” and “the Valley,” noting that locals use it jokingly and that it has “kind of become a term of endearment.”
What it is not
Snottsdale is not a neighborhood, a ZIP code or an official anything, and it is not the same insult as Zonie, which is what Californians call all Arizonans. It is the Valley’s internal joke, aimed inward at one city, and the people who tell it generally also drive here to eat.
The fine print
The word’s status is contested in the lexicon’s sense: it is used against the people it names, and those people have adopted it. The 2006 reporting is the only documented turning point. The Star story is a Tucson paper’s view of a Phoenix-area quarrel, and it captured the mechanism exactly: Scottsdale had been marketing exclusivity, the MTV episode supplied a face for it, and the nickname did the rest. The Chamber’s complaint was not that the word was new but that a television show had made it the first thing a national audience knew about the city.
What the record does not hold is a first use. Search any archive and “Snottsdale” surfaces fully formed, never explained, which is the signature of a pun that many people made independently. Claims that a particular columnist, DJ or bumper sticker started it should be treated as folklore until someone produces the clipping.
The geography of the joke is worth knowing. North Scottsdale, with household incomes well above the county median and the gated communities to match, is where the stereotype lives; the Old Town bar blocks and the bachelorette trade documented in the Old Town nightlife guide are where visitors encounter it; and South Scottsdale, whose ranch houses were built for Motorola engineers, mostly gets to watch. The city’s own response has been to say nothing, which is the correct one. Scottsdale’s official motto remains “The West’s Most Western Town,” and the gap between that phrase and this one is the whole history of the city since 1951.