[PW] Nosy Parker-- urban legend or not?

[Grant Barrett]

Donna,

I'm a professional historical lexicographer and do this sort of  
research frequently for a variety of purposes. For the language- 
related public radio show "A Way with Words," for which I am co-host,  
I recently revisited the known information about "nosy parker" and  
did my own investigation using primary research into more than a  
dozen free and fee-based digital databases.

My conclusion, as is often the case with "just so" word origin  
stories, is that there is no--zero, none, nada--information to  
support any of the theories proposed so far, except for the one that  
suggest it simply as a kind of "Joe Sixpack/Peeping Tom/Chatty Cathy"  
name that indicates the universality of certain human behaviors.

I was able to antedate the published OED by 17 years (which is very  
easy to do, given its slow update cycle and the rapid increase in  
digital periodical databases that can be searched in just a few  
minutes), with this (mentioned in the podcast):

http://tinyurl.com/2b9ng8

You can hear a podcast summary of my digging here:

http://waywordradio.org/butternut/

Cheers,

Grant Barrett

Co-host, A Way With Words
http://www.waywordradio.org/

Editor, Double-Tongued Dictionary
http://www.doubletongued.org/

Vice President of Communications and Technology,
American Dialect Society
http://www.americandialect.org/

Editor of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (2006) and  
the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (2004).

gbarrett at worldnewyork.org
113 Park Place, Apt. 3
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(646) 286-2260

On Nov 23, 2007, at 12:52, Donna Halper wrote:

> I am fact-checking a manuscript and in it, the author asserts that
> the Nosy Parker story -- the one that attributes the expression to
> cleric Matthew Parker, who allegedly had a large nose, and also did
> lots of invasive investigations into people's lives -- is
> factual.  But I have checked journals and articles from the 1700s and
> 1800s, and find no mention of either fact.  Further, the OED says the
> term didn't come into use till 1907, and it seems a British
> journalist from the London Evening Standard (if I recall correctly)
> was the one to assert, although I don't know when, that Matthew
> Parker was in fact the original "Nosy Parker."
>
> Is there any way to find some source for this belief other than
> somebody at a newspaper said it was true and it's repeated on the
> internet a lot?
>
> Donna L. Halper, Journalism Dept. Emerson College Boston MA
>
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