Q: Coiner of "power nap"?

[victor steinbok]

There is an entry in GNA that is intriguingly earlier than OED date,
but only by six weeks.

Newmarket MD's book on stress is bestseller
Pay-Per-View - Toronto Star - ProQuest Archiver - Mar 18, 1986
Hanson is in the studio to record a tape called the Joy of Stress
Power Nap - an audio extension of a part of his book's subject matter
- which should be ...

Searching on-site gets the same reference and adds the page number
N13. It's not labeled as such, but it's PQ. Amazon says Peter Hanson's
Joy of Stress was published April 1986 (still earlier than OED date),
the cassette came out in May and the CD in November. The book is not
in GB

Doing a search for "power nap[]" & Maas gives the earliest hits in 1989:

Don't worry - be nap-py | Article from Chicago Sun-Times | HighBeam …
Pay-Per-View - Chicago Sun-Times - HighBeam Research - Feb 26, 1989
It's time for the power nap. This afternoon, instead of ... expert
James Maas. " Take a power nap to get you through the rest of ...
sleeping is when you ...

Taking up arms in one's own defense | Article from Chicago Sun-Times...
Pay-Per-View - Chicago Sun-Times - HighBeam Research - Mar 26, 1989
"Take a power nap to get you through the rest of the day," advises
Maas, a Cornell University psychology professor ... filmmaker who
specializes in sleep ...

This does not mean outright that Maas is full of it, but, unless
Hanson stole the idea from him, it comes pretty close. Maas made an
industry of it since the 1990s which, to me, suggests that he's a
quack--at least when it comes to claims of primacy.

I'm generally skeptical of self-promoting coinage claims (I've coined
a few things myself, only to discover that someone had beat me to
it--sometimes by decades)--usually they are based on either faulty
memories or independent re-coinage (popularizing a term invented by
someone else--which seems to be the case here), but they also require
an oversize ego or a persecution complex. Since Maas has a
reputational interest in the claim, I'm inclined to dismiss it.

VS-)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org