brickbat vs snark

brickbat

noun
  • A criticism or uncomplimentary remark. 

  • A piece of brick used as a weapon, especially if thrown, or placed in something like a sock and used as a club. 

verb
  • To assail with criticism. 

  • To attack by throwing brickbats. 

snark

noun
  • Snide remarks or attitude. 

  • The fictional creature of Lewis Carroll's poem, used allusively to refer to fruitless quest or search. 

  • A fluke or unrepeatable result or detection in an experiment. 

  • A graph in which every node has three branches, and the edges cannot be coloured in fewer than four colours without two edges of the same colour meeting at a point. 

verb
  • To express oneself in a snarky fashion. 

How often have the words brickbat and snark occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )