Busybody

:Disambiguation: For the fictional character see Bessie Busybody.

A busybody is a gossipy, meddlesome person; one who pries into the affairs of others.

Famous busybodies in history
In 415 B.C. Alcibiades, the greatest Athenian general, set sail to fight a war against the city of Syracuse. A busybody, whose name has not gone down in history, told a tale, claiming, without evidence, that Alcibiades has broken the noses and other body parts off the statues of the god Hermes. As a result, Alcibiades was recalled and an incompetent sent in his place. Athens lost the war.

One of the world's greatest busybodies was Procopius, a Byzantine court historian circa A.D. 500. All the while he was writing an official court history, he was digging up all the dirt he could find on the Empress Theodora, and other prominent persons at court, which he published in a book titled Anecdota, usually referred to as the Secret History. In this book he, for example, accuses Theodora of having sex with animals on stage.

Benjamin Franklin also invented a device known as a Busybody (or Franklin's Busybody), which was affixed to the exterior of a house near an upper floor window, and used mirrors so the occupant could see the goings-on in the street below. They can be seen in Elfreth's Alley in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is the oldest residential street in the country.

Famous busybodies in literature and the arts
In Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is an unforgettable busybody, denouncing her enemies so that they will be killed in the French Revolution. She hides the names of the people she is denouncing in her knitting.

In the early silent cinema in America, the busybody is a stock character, harassing The Girl in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance and trying to take The Kid away from the Little Tramp in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. In these films, the busybody is usually an upper class woman with too much time on her hands, who believes that her social class gives her moral superiority over the lower class characters in whose lives she meddles.

In Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie, Annie is often beset by busybodies who want to lock her up in an orphanage "for her own good".

Dorothy L. Sayers in her Christian apologetics bemoans the fact that so many Christians ignore Christ's injunction to not look for the mote in your brother's eye, and act like busybodies. "Busybody" is often preceded by the adjective "sanctimonious".

Author and scholar C. S. Lewis wrote, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

The busybody as a universal human type
Every human culture has its busybodies, in all classes and of both genders. There is, it seems, a recurring human type who loves to poke their nose into other people's business. While sex is the topic that busybodies most often gossip about, money is almost as important to them, and there is no subject off limits to their prying. There was, for example, in New Orleans, at the time when marriage between the races was against the law, a minor government functionary who loved to investigate every marriage in the city, and denounce the couple if he could find any mixed race ancestry, even going back many generations.

MYOB
MYOB is an abbreviation for "mind your own business". The opposite of a busybody is a person who minds his or her own business.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu