This is what I always assumed. Just the same as the way the word “clerk” is pronouced “clark” in Britain.
I heard the term first on a radio episode of The Goon Show, from the 1950’s. Bluebottle says, while at the top of a very tall ladder (he was trying to prove that the sun was on fire by holding up a piece of bread to see if it got toasted), “Ooh, it’s a bit perky up 'ere!” The word “perky” meaning chilly made sense to me, much more than “parky” does.
Roddy
I often see groups of train spotters on the platform of some stations around here - especially Eastleigh, where there’s a big railway works and a significant area of sidings where unusual engines, rolling stock and other stuff that goes on rails may be found.
And they all have their thermos of tea, their tupperware box of sandwiches, their clipboards, their binoculars, and their video cameras on tripods (I understand this is so that they can replay the footage later and note down the indentification marks of each carriage for trains that pass through the station without stopping.
They’re usually dressed for all weathers - often in anoraks (is this the origin of the anorak=nerd connection?)
That’s what has been reported here before.
Except perky isn’t generally pronounced ‘parky’ (there might be some regional accents that pronounce perky in such way that people from a different region may perceive it as sounding like parky, but this is still different from clerk, which everyone perceives as ‘clark’ in their own regional accent)
The origin might still be plausible - just wanted to point out that Perky is not to Parky as Clerk is to Clark
Also “Perky” pronounced the US way is used in the UK for something else, basically being quite awake.
Very familar with the term ‘parky’. It may well be Yorkshire in origin, but my background is Midlands so it’s obviously travelled a bit.
I also know that Parkas with fur trim hoods were very popular in the 70s in the UK. I know, because my mother wouldn’t let me have one (too common and boyish, apparently, I was forced to wear some horrible woollen girls coat with a belt, ugh).
Somebody mentioned that the first known citation of parky was in 1895. Given that there were quite a large number of Brits who visited northern Canada from 1845 (there were at least a dozen missions which set out to find the doomed Franklin expedition) it is not too farfetched to imagine that parky did, in fact derive from parka.
I have to agree with Wendell Wagner. “Parky” is a rather old fashioned expression, probably going out of use now, and used mostly by older people. (It may be more common in Yorkshire, where I have lived, but I am pretty sure it would be understood, though perhaps not commonly used, at least by older people, all over Britain.) “Parka” is a relatively new word in British English. I do not remember it being in use when I was a kid in the 1950s and '60s (when “parky” was probably already a bit dated sounding). “Parka” probably came into common use in the 1970s, as SanVito’s post suggests. The words are not connected.