"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/01/18 (nose: cut-off your nose to spite your face, ness, nozzle, Nosey Parker)

I was talking a while ago about the origin of paying through the nose, which is rather strange expression, and ehere did it came from and I didn't quite have time to throw in some more nosey facts, and because Richard has said to me he's long be teased for his nose, I'm not quite sure why, I thought I would just explain a little bit about how nose operates in English because there are so many, literally hundreds and hundreds expressions which involve our nose in some way in the English language. So you can get up someone's nose, you can have your nose in front,  you can have your nose out of joint, you can win by a nose, look down your nose or stick your nose up. You can keep your nose clean or you can cut-off your nose to spite your face and that's really, really old. In fact, it wasn't recorded until 1785 in Francis Grose's favourite classical Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue, which he collected all the vocabulary and the vernacularof the common people as opposed to the literature that Samuel Johnson collected. And he was the first to mentioned it, he said, "When someone cut off his nose to be revenged of his face, said by one who to be revenged of his neighbour, has materially injured himself". But obviously it was in circulation a long, long before that. But you will also find noses hidden in other words. For example, ness, we talk about Loch Ness, Inverness, that actually is a form of nose and it refers to a headland or promontory nearby. Nozzle was a 7th century slang form of nose and schnozzle is the Yiddish version. And lots and lots of noses in crime as well, so you can be a nark, a snitch or a snout, all of those are terms for someone who stick their nose in, if you like, as an informer in that sense. The first Nosey Parker appeared in a postcard caption from 1907, The Adventures of Nosey Parker, ehich is referred to a Peeping Tom in Hyde Park. Now, nosey is self-explanatory, that's quite an old sense of, again, somebody, who's quite inquisitive and curious and possibly having a big nose, which you obviously haven't. But the common surename Parker was originally given to caretakers of parks or large enclosures of land, so the idea was of park keeper who likes spying perhaps voyeuristically on couples who were canoodling in the park.