Q: Coiner of "power nap"?

[Jonathan Lighter]

I used to have a copy of "The Joy of Stress."

It is barely possible that I can find it. (I may have discarded it when I
realized fully that the title was, you know, just a come-on.)

ISTR that one of the author's wise counsels was not to major in Old English
poetry if you ever expected to make a good living or attract babes, which
failure could increase long-term stress.

JL

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 1:52 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Q: Coiner of "power nap"?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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-)
>
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