A mocking reference to God, especially "
God the Father", or the
Old Testament patriarchical God. The term was coined by the
English poet and
mystic William Blake (see
To Nobodaddy). This is an excerpt from Blake's poem
When Klopstock England defied:
Then again old Nobodaddy swore,
He ne'er had seen such a thing before,
Since Noah was shut in the ark,
Since Eve first chose her hellfire spark,
Since 'twas the fashion to go naked,
Since the old Anything was created...
George Bernard Shaw used it in
Back to Methuselah:
The moment Nobodaddy was slain by Darwin, Public Opinion, as divine deputy, lost its sanctity.
And in
Joyce's Ulysses:
Whether these be sins or virtues, old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet.
The word used as a specific reference to God gradually turned into a general reference for anyone or thing that had once been held in esteem, but is now contemptible. The
OED gives a quote from 1962,
Listener 29 Nov 932/1:
Goethe is in danger of turning into a Nobodaddy - a booming, boring member of that depressed class, the illustrious Dead.
The word is sometimes found in book, story and play titles, such as
Nobodaddy , a play by
Archibald MacLeish, and
Nobodaddy's Children by Arno Schmidt.