TIME was, long ago, when Muslim commentators delved with tabloid nosiness into the public and private life of the Prophet Muhammad.
But is it a craven love of hierarchy, or a polite but bloody-minded nosiness?
Sinhalese Buddhism has 136 and Burmese Buddhism 40,040, one for each particular sin including nosiness, chicken-selling and eating sweets with rice.
So the best people to help satisfy my nosiness are the team at my own DVD subscription service Lovefilm, the UK's biggest online film rental company.
However, what fascinates me about Koenig's investigation is that it is a testament to the modern face of nosiness, of tracking down, of the sheer overwhelming abundance of information and interviews which one determined person, using today's tools, can amass independently on a historical crime with impressive speed.
In The Trouble With Goats and Sheep, the disappearance of a local woman, Mrs Creasy, causes a small community already suffering a heatwave almost to combust from pure nosiness.
Some things that people wish to suppress are private – debt, drink problems, embarrassing relatives, unwanted pregnancy – but if they're not illegal, and there's no reason, beyond pure nosiness or score-settling, for making them public, they shouldn't be published.
It long ago occurred to me that my obituary habit derived from the same instinctive curiosity, the same blithe inquisitiveness — O.K., nosiness — that made me a reporter.
Everything is going aces until the waitress, who, like a raccoon, combines indifference and nosiness, flips through the Book It! certificate.
Still, seeing her through other people's eyes, Hanfeng realized that all that made her who she was — the decades of solitude in her widowhood, her coldness to the prying eyes of people who tried to mask their nosiness with friendliness, and her faith in the notion of living one's own life without having to go out of one's way for other people — could be deemed pointless and laughable.
This frees her up to resume control of her own money, which buys her a new laptop, which allows her to hack into Blomkvist's own computer — for no apparent reason other than sheer nosiness — all of which inspires him to take her on as a deputy.
