Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Although there are many proposed etymologies for the word copacetic, the truth is no one knows the origin of this word meaning “fine” or “extremely satisfactory.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Everything is Copacetic”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi y’all, this is Max from Dallas, Texas.
Hey Max.
Hey Max, what’s up?
Hey, I’m asking about a word I heard my boyfriend use, copacetic.
Copacetic.
I’ve never really dated a black man before, and he uses some strange language.
And this is one in particular I couldn’t really look up.
He used it kind of like to mean everything is, you know, everything is cool or like that’s cool with me.
But he also wants us to know that it’s really not copacetic.
Or it’s really not very cool to be talking about the definition of the word copacetic.
Oh, is that right?
Is that one of the rules of Fight Club, don’t talk about copacetic?
Well, it’s just not very copacetic to be looking it up in a dictionary like this.
I was immediately alerted to the way you phrased it, that you think this is connected to the fact that your boyfriend is African American.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, because you’re not, you’re white.
No, no, no, I’m a white guy, yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay, so that’s interesting right there.
And so what else, it just means fine, good, nice.
What else does it mean?
It means like cool, like he said people at a club can be like, you know, if they’re looking real cool, you can be like, well, that’s real copacetic how they’re hanging out.
Yeah.
But then I also, I was primed for it, and I heard in the Tal of Quali lyric, he said copasthetic.
Yeah.
And he rhymed it with, like, open credit, you know, like, but he used it to mean, like, you don’t buy that stuff on open credit.
Things aren’t all copasthetic.
Copasthetic, right.
Copasthetic.
That’s super interesting, too.
Really, really interesting stuff.
This word is a big, fat origin unknown, like firmly origin unknown.
All of the proposed theories, and I’m not going to go into any of them, have almost no evidence to support them.
So I’m definitely not going to get into them because it will just distract you from the fact that it is firmly origin unknown.
There are a ton of spellings for it, including copasthetic.
So there would be an S-T-H there in the middle.
And some people, assuming it’s Italian, have come up with spellings and pronunciations that look a little more Italian or sound a little more Italian.
Really?
Yeah, but it’s not Italian as far as we can tell.
It’s not Hebrew. It’s not French. It doesn’t come from New Orleans. It’s not Yiddish.
None of the theories that people propose, they’re all like very bogus, usually based upon trying to claim it for their people.
Like a little bit of cultural pride with all my people came up with it.
We do find it the very first use in a book from 1919 and a book about Abraham Lincoln, of all things, where it’s fiction.
There’s a character called Mrs. Peter Lukens, and she uses it three times.
And even in the book, they say it’s her favorite word.
But before that, I don’t know of a single printed use of this.
And believe me, believe me, the word historians and the etymologists and the people who are into slang profession, like the people who write the dictionaries, have looked thoroughly, thoroughly into this word and found it just pops up.
And we don’t really know how or why it happened.
Well, that’s great.
Yeah, the only big hint that we have is that it pops up in 1919.
And World War I was a huge flowering of new language as English speakers from around the world met each other on the battlefield and shared tents and trenches and so forth.
And swapped a ton of language and then brought it back to their home countries.
So it’s a huge, huge time for new slang and new language.
It may be marked as African American now, but historically it hasn’t been particularly used by black English speakers at all.
Really?
It’s been like normal for anyone to use anywhere.
It was maybe a little more used in the cities of the Northeast, but otherwise there’s no particular history of it being exclusively African-American at all.
Yeah, he’s from Houston.
His family’s from Alabama.
And he says he’s always heard it in the black neighborhood and that his father used the word.
And he says he’s always heard it in the black neighborhood.
Yeah, that’s really, really interesting.
Well, Max, thanks a bunch for calling.
Yeah, great stuff.
Thanks, y’all, for looking up the word for me.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Sure thing. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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