Wednesdays* are perfect for the heady joy of satisfying our etymological curiosity. And what better to consider than curiosity itself…
Curiosity comes from curious which evolved from the Latin cura to care. Lots of interesting developments have wound their way into the language from cura: cure and curate and curator and curio, just to name a few.
From around 1883, booksellers referred euphemistically to erotica and pornography as curious books or curiosa, deriving perhaps from the 18th century meaning that something curious was ‘exciting curiosity’.
The exclamation of “Curiouser and curiouser” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 was attributed by Lewis Carroll to her being so surprised she forgot how to speak good English. Never fear. Like other contributions made to the language by Carroll (which include chortle, galumph, snark, vorpal and the concept of a portmanteau word) it is now commonly used and understood (according to the Oxford Dictionary) to mean ‘increasingly strange’.
It’s a well-known fact that curiosity is inimical to felines, so keep your cats off the keyboard as we delve a little deeper with the help of the Online Etymology Dictionary.**
Busy now means only being continually occupied, but it once also meant being anxiously careful and potentially prying or meddlesome and so a busybody was a person who snooped and pried into things that worried them, but were not really their business (or busyness, if you want to go old school).
‘Snoop’ is from 1832 American English, possibly from the Dutch snoepen ‘to pry’.
‘Pry’ is much older (c.1300) from prien ‘to peer into’.
The use of ‘nose’ as a verb, rather than a noun, in the sense of prying or searching something out, is first recorded in the 1640s, and being nosy meant having a prominent nose for centuries before it was used as an adjective to mean inquisitive in 1882.
To call a nose a beak has also been around for centuries and stickybeak is an Antipodean word to describe being inquisitive. You stick your beak into something in Australia or New Zealand and you are, ipso facto, a stickybeak. The act of sticking said beak can be referred to as stickybeaking or you can say, to justify your curiosity about something, ‘I just wanted a stickybeak.’
It doesn’t necessarily carry negative connotations, but dismissing someone as ‘an old stickybeak’ is like saying they’re a busybody – it’s pretty derogatory.
When I was a kid, with the surname of Parker, if someone showed an excess of curiosity, they were a stickybeak. You may imagine my horror, aged 8, when our substitute teacher told someone off in class for trying to eavesdrop by calling them ‘a nosy Parker’.
Not cool, man. Not cool.
After I lived down the shame (never more thankful that my nose is delightfully retrousse or I would NEVER have lived it down) I looked into what ancestral Parker had doomed us all to being thought stickybeaks.
The popular theory was it had been Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, who was to blame. Or it may have been that parkers were park keepers and given to snooping when illicit couplings caused the shrubbery to rustle. It was an occupational hazard (or perk, depending on perspective) in the same way that people out ‘walking their dog’ engage in dogging.
But the first recorded use of nosy Parker isn’t until 1907, well after the heyday of the archbishop and of Parkers being necessarily associated with parks. So it remains unclear just which Parker was to blame for marking us all as nosy.
And now to digress from etymology and swerve into genealogy:
Despite the huge numbers of Parkers in England, the story in my family was that we were descended from the archbishop, and, since the family came from Cambridgeshire, also from the Parker after whom Parker’s Piece in Cambridge is named.
I was curious.
So, when I lived for six months in Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire, I took the opportunity to do a genealogy course and to trundle down to Cambridge to have a stickybeak in the shire records office. I found no link to the archbishop nor to the Trinity College cook who kept cows on Parker’s Piece.
But I did find that my 10 x great-grandfather was Thomas Hobson.
Hobson ran an inn in Cambridge which hired out horses, to students and academics especially. His practice was to rent out the next available horse – regardless of what horse was wanted – because then the fastest horses didn’t get overworked. The saying that you have ‘Hobson’s choice’ – take it or leave it – is said to have been popularised by the poet John Milton, who as a Cambridge University student, wrote mock epitaphs for Hobson.
So I can’t claim to be a ‘proper’ nosy Parker… but I can claim a remote genealogical link to having a cavalier approach to other people’s wishes.
Hobson’s daughter, Elizabeth, married a chap called Fookes or Fowkes or Fox (they were a little slapdash with the spelling back in the late 1500s) who, before he died, sold his property of Anglesey Abbey to Hobson. When Elizabeth married Thomas Parker, Hobson gave it to them as a wedding gift.
Somehow, despite Anglesey Abbey now being a National Trust property, I never managed to pay it a visit, although I did get to the little village of Bottisham nearby, where lots of Parkers lived and died in obscurity before, in three generations my ancestors moved back to Cambridge, then to London and then to north Queensland.
One day, though, I’ve promised myself I’ll also get back to Cambridgeshire and have a stickybeak at Anglesey Abbey.
* Wednesdays are perfect for words – honestly, it’s a thing.
** An invaluable resource for writers of historical fiction who don’t want anachronistic words in their book.