In the book the word is used twice by a character named Mrs. Lukins, noted for her idiosyncratic speech. Bacheller emphasizes that this word and coralapus are her peculiar property: "For a long time the word 'coralapus' had been a prized possession of Mrs. Lukins …There was one other word in her lexicon which was in the nature of a jewel to be used only on special occasions. It was the word 'copasetic.' The best society of Salem Hill understood perfectly that it signaled an unusual depth of meaning" (pp. While coralapus passes into oblivion after the novel, it is only the beginning for copasetic-though it is far from certain that Bacheller coined the word.
Keep it copacetic password#
KEEP IT COPACETIC PASSWORDĬopasetic next appears in 1920, in the lyrics of a song, "At the New Jump Steady Ball," by the African American songwriters Tom Delaney (1889-1963) and Sidney Easton (1886-1971): "Copasetic was the password for all, At the new jump steady ball " a performance of the song was the first issued recording by the singer Ethel Waters, in March, 1921 (see post and link to the song by Stephen Goranson at the website Language Log, March 3, 2017). This attestation begins a long association of the word with African American speech. It was used by the tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (1877-1949) in radio broadcasts during the 1930's Robinson claimed to have coined the word in an exchange of letters with the lexicographer Charles Earle Funke (see Funke's article "Bill Robinson's 'Copesetic'," American Speech, vol. 230-31, citing an earlier column by Funke and Frank Vizetelly in The Literary Digest, vol. Funke's American Speech article apparently inaugurates the tradition of searching outside English for the origin of copacetic. He cites a report by a correspondent from Milwaukee that the word comes from Louisiana French coupe-sètique the correspondent even proffers its use in a couplet from "a charming old Acadian poem." Unfortunately, outside of this claim, such a word is not known to exist in any variety of French. The same absence of support vitiates other suggested sources, as Chinook Jargon copasenee (not actually attested in Chinook Jargon) and the putative Italian word copasetti produced by the novelist John O'Hara in a letter of December, 1934 ( Selected Letters of John O'Hara, New York, 1978, p. Most prominent in recent decades has been the hypothesis that copacetic is borrowed from Israeli Hebrew hakol beseder "all is in order" (in a transliteration from pointed spelling ha-kōl bĕ-sēdher), a calque on expressions in European languages (German "alles in Ordnung," Polish "wszystko w porządku," Russian "vsë v porjadke").
0 kommentar(er)
