meter maid

It’ s an interesting sidelight on the process of language osmosis in modern times that I too had thought this an English usage dating from the early sixties. But no, it’s another familiar part of my lexicon apparently soaked up from my brethren over the pond…!


meter maid orig. U.S.
1957 in Amer. Speech (1961) XXXVI. 282 Surveys conducted in cities using ‘meter maids’ have found that their meter revenue increased. 1958 Britannica Bk. of Year 519/2 Meter maid,+a woman police official with the task of patrolling metered parking-sites and reporting parking offences. 1968 Harper's Mag. Feb. 41 A Meter Maid was soon watching me censoriously. 1970 S. Ellin Man from Nowhere xxx. 150 Some meter maid found him when she looked in the car where it was parked uptown. 1970 Sunday Times 3 May 28/7 Why do meter maids+never look glamorous at all?

OED2


and a sidelight on the French connection from Anu's feedback emails:

With typical Gallic humor, meter maids (as we call them) were first known as "aubergines", which means "eggplants", because their uniforms were purple. The name stuck, so much so that while living in France (3 years) I never learned the official word for meter maid. It was never used. Eventually, the government found the appellation "aubergines" sufficiently embarrassing that they changed the color to blue; whereupon the French immediately changed the name to "Gitanes", the name of a brand of cigarettes which come in a box the same shade of blue as the new uniform.

http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/awadmail36.html