NOSY PARKER
[Q] From Jo Ann Larkin: “I am a language arts teacher and I often use word etymology to pique my students’ interest in the development of language. We all enjoy discussing the origin of slang phrases. One in particular has us stumped, so I submit it to you for any help you may be able to give us. The term in question is nosy Parker. Any ideas?”
[A] The short answer is that nobody knows where it comes from, but that hardly seems like an adequate response. Some pointers, then.
The most usual origin suggested is the late (the very late) Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. He was a reforming cleric, noted for sending out detailed enquiries and instructions relating to the conduct of his diocese. Like many reformers, he was regarded as a busybody.
However, the huge flaw in this suggestion is that the term nosey Parker isn’t recorded until 1907. The term nosey for someone inquisitive, figuratively always sticking their nose into other people’s affairs, is a little older, but even that only dates back to the 1880s. Before then, anyone called nosey was just somebody with a big nose, like the Duke of Wellington, who had the nickname Old Nosey.
One suggestion, put forward by Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, was that the saying dates from the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. Very large numbers of people attended the Exhibition, so there would have been lots of opportunities for peeping Toms and eavesdroppers in the grounds. The word parker has since medieval times been used for an official in charge of a park, a park-keeper; I’ve read that the term was used informally for the royal park-keepers who supervised Hyde Park at the time of the Great Exhibition. So the saying might conceivably have been applied to a nosey park-keeper. It would require the inquisitive sense of nosey to have originated about 30 years before it is first recorded — not impossible.
Another idea, put forward in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, is that the phrase nosey Parker was originally nose-poker. Poker, in the sense of somebody who pries into another’s affairs, certainly has a long history, well pre-dating the nineteenth century appearance of nosey Parker. It’s not impossible that nose-poker became modified with the second element being converted into a proper name. Stranger things have happened. But evidence is suspiciously lacking: the Oxford English Dictionary has no record of nose-poker anywhere and I can’t find an example.
But all this is the purest supposition. The evidence isn’t on record, and the truth will probably never be found.
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