Q: Coiner of "power nap"?

[Joel S. Berson]

As I reported when I first asked this question,
there appears to be a 1985 publication -- or at
least copyright date, which is, I presume, what
the OED uses in the absence of anything to the
contrary -- seen both in GB and WorldCat:

>The Joy of Stress - Page 87.  Hanson, Peter G.
>(Peter George), Schemenauer, Elma, Hanson. 1985
>- 223 pages.  (GB)  WorldCat lists "The joy of stress : how to live
>well past 100 or die trying!", (c) 1985.  Snippet view in GB.

Joel

At 3/17/2010 01:52 PM, victor steinbok wrote:
>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.

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