Subject: Re: Who was Nosey Parker?
Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2000 14:09:07 -0800
From: Towse
Organization: wURLitzer
Newsgroups: misc.writing
|
|
Subject: Re: Who was Nosey Parker? Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2000 14:09:07 -0800 From: Towse Organization: wURLitzer Newsgroups: misc.writing |
|
SCHARKIE wrote: > > This expression was once widespread, and most people still understand > the reference to be to a nosey person, but who was the original? > from scharkie@aol.com Nosey (aka Nosy) Parker was grandfather to "Painless" Parker -- Edgar R.R. Parker, flimflamscamman, grandstanding puller of teeth, travelling tooth-pulling carnival huckster and graduate of Philadelphia Dental College, which became Temple's School of Dentistry. Amongst Temple's School of Dentistry's exhibits you will find a wooden bucket filled to within an inch or two of its brim, with hundreds, thousands of teeth pulled by "Painless." Parker's dental career evolved from a Barnum and Bailey-like traveling tooth-pulling show into a chain of thirty "'Painless' Parker, Dentist" dental clinics on the West Coast, grossing millions a year. Painless' grandfather, Nosey (Nathaniel Othello Samuel) Parker was also in the medical field, but he specialized in protheses: rubber ear tips, wooden peg legs, hooked hands and the like. He was a contemporary of Barrie, who used one of Nosey's patients as a model for the villain in Peter Pan. Parker was also a writer and a publisher and ran a gossip sheet that was the source of many a rumour regarding the Royal Family and the maids. Parker snooped, it must be admitted, and, like those supermarket tabloids today, he paid others to snoop. (Barrie may have made some cash on the side because of the view he had from his second floor window.) Parker's gossip sheet was hot, hotter than Tabasco, hotter than hot, hotter than Scottsdale midday in July. The combination of the tabloid and Parker's living caused an odd transference and Nosey Parker (meaning someone who lurked in the bushes looking for scandal, someone who questioned the tweeny about who was slipping down the hall to where at 3AM) evolved out of Parker's "real" profession and the nickname he'd acquired not only because of his initials but also because amongst his protheses were, yes, of course, made-to-order wax noses, for those who'd rashly (and bloodily) cut off their noses to spite their faces. |