Anyone who has learned English as a second tongue knows how maddening this language is. It’s inexplicable, for example, that when we find a piece of chocolate, we can gobble it up or snarf it down. Why the one verb tends to be associated with “up-ness” and the other with “down-ness” is a mystery; it’s simply one of the peculiar linguistic patterns that we are never explicitly taught, but unconsciously absorb. The word snarf is probably not as old as you are: it doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the earliest usage that I’ve been able to track down occurs in the Washington Post in 1984. Snarf may have originated as a humorous representation of the sound that characterizes an abrupt gulp. Alternatively, it may be a portmanteau word, formed by combining the verb snap with the verb scarf. Recently, the word has been coopted by computer nerds to denote the act of downloading a large file, usually without first receiving authorization.