I was driving recently when a text popped up from a buddy I haven’t talked to in a while. I glanced over at it and saw the words “History of Masshole.’’

Was this a story suggestion? My friends try, and fail, to entice me with dumb story ideas all the time, because I need better friends. But this buddy, Nick Haney, is annoyingly well read. Was there more information on the text? Was this a dare? Suddenly, my mind was consumed with the desire to know: What is the history of the word “Masshole?’’

I could immediately and vividly remember the first time I heard it, in college in New Orleans in the mid-’90s, when a student from New Hampshire took one sniff of my accent and said, “Ohhh, you’re a Masshole.’’

“Absolutely,’’ I replied. “Also, what?’’

A Big Dig role?

Three decades later, I was looking for a place to pull my car over so I could look at the text. Which, intriguingly, contained a link to a “Chronicle’’ segment about a Big Dig exhibit at the West End Museum. The clip opened with Dave Kruh, a former spokesperson for the Big Dig who helped create the exhibit, pointing at an aerial image of a tangle of roads, and stating that “I believe it is up there, in that 300-foot weave, where we first invented the term Masshole.’’

I called my buddy. “Wait, Masshole comes from the Big Dig? How did I not know this?!’’

I’m the kind of Masshole who likes knowing Masshole things, and gets upset when he is a middle-aged man before he realizes that the Charles River and the Boston Marathon both start in Hopkinton, or that Boston allegedly chose 617 as its area code because that’s Bunker Hill Day (a very Masshole decision because that was a pain to dial on a rotary phone, while D.C. and New York chose the much easier 202 and 212).

“I have no idea,’’ my buddy replied, “but I knew it would drive you nuts and you’d want to figure it out.’’ What a Mass-hole.

The search for truth

I got on the phone with Kruh, who was sorry to inform me that it was a joke, one he uses because people’s attention tends to drift when he’s giving a tour of the exhibit. Such a Masshole move.

But now he was intrigued, and I was more intrigued, so I finally used this new invention called Google, where I discovered that when it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, they credited a British journalist named Matt Ridley with its first usage in print.

In 1989, he published a book about covering the US presidential election the previous year, which featured one Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts.

“The New Hampshire people have a nickname for the refugees from Massachusetts,’’ Ridley wrote. “Massholes.’’

A caveat

That was just its first appearance in print. So it existed before that, but since when? Always?

Did someone coin this term, or was it just sitting there, invented spontaneously and repeatedly by people sitting in traffic? The Lincoln Town Car came out in 1981; surely many people blurted it out when cut off by one of those Massholes.

We’ll never know. But we can try. So I’d be curious to hear from readers in the comments. When was the first time you remember hearing the word Masshole?

Also, to that kid who called me a Masshole in college, I’ll have you know one thing:

When my kids leave their bikes and junk all over the yard, I tell them, “We don’t live in New Hampshire!’’

Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker @globe.com