How’s Your Copperosity?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kendall McDevitt calling from Boone, North Carolina.

Hey, Kendall, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

I’m calling about a word that has been used in my family for many years.

And the word is coporosity.

And the word was used, my mother especially used it.

She was originally from out west in Colorado and Wyoming, and she would use it with my brother and my sister and I growing up really to inquire about how we were feeling, like how was our mood?

She would often use it if we’d had a bad day the day before and we’d wake up in the morning and she’d say, hi, Kendall, how’s your coperosity this morning?

So it was like a way to ask, how are you feeling? How are you doing?

But it’s a little more nuanced than just saying, how are you? Or how’s your mood?

And it seemed to communicate a lot of care as well.

So anyway, I’m really curious about where this word comes from.

Is it a real word? Is it just something our family has made up? I don’t know.

That sounds really sweet, actually. And it is real.

And it’s not just your family. And it’s got a lot of history behind it.

And it plugs into a long tradition, actually, of asking how people are doing.

Oh.

Yeah.

It’s a coperosity is spelled C-O-P-P-E-R-O-S-I-T-Y.

But it’s a form of the word corporosity, C-O-R-P-O-R-O-S-I-T-Y, which is a fancified version of the word corpus, meaning body.

So if you’re asking someone how their corporosity or corporosity is, you’re just asking, how is your body?

Or how are you doing?

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we find corporosity at least as far back as 1821.

So that’s 200 years.

And sometimes in the early days, it refers specifically to a big body or a rotund body or a corpulent one.

But more often, it’s just how is your whole physical being?

How are you?

You know, how’s your health?

What is the status of you?

One of the earliest uses we have of it in particular, not the very earliest, but one I think worth mentioning is a British newspaper in 1842 is reporting back to its readers in the UK about the strange ways of Texans.

And it writes, the usual salutation of the Texan gentleman is, how does your coporosity sedgeciate this morning?

And other conversational openers, by the way, that it suggests are a pretty considerable of a jug full of sun this morning and a tarnation of upstreet sort of day, this I calculate.

I don’t know if those would fly in Houston or Dallas these days.

How fantastic.

It’s got a really long history and tends to be used in the American South from the Carolinas and West.

And it does show up in the American West as part of the Western movement of migration, definitely in mining country during the different gold rushes and so forth.

And definitely moved west during the post-Civil War migration as people went out there to seek their fortunes and claim land and so forth.

Well, that’s fascinating because, of course, my mother was from out west, but I was raised actually in the south.

I was raised in North Carolina.

So she picked it up out west and brought it back south, I guess.

Yeah, we do find it in North Carolina.

The Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris use it.

Those are from 1904, and I believe he was from North Carolina.

I love that added nuance of care and concern in there.

I do too, yeah.

Even though it’s a kind of hyper-fancified way of talking,

That kind of stilted way that we sometimes think of the Old West

Where people would just kind of put on their best artificial manners.

They didn’t really have book learning, but they could put on a fancy voice in the best way they knew how.

It’s kind of a little bit of that.

Yeah, it’s like pushing back from the table and saying, I’m sufficiently suffonsified.

Yeah, it’s exactly that kind of tone.

So, Kendall, how is your copperosity today?

How is your copperosity?

My copperosity is fabulous right now, especially because I’m on the show and I’m getting all this information.

Well, it has been delightful to talk with you, Kendall.

We are just so happy to have you on the show.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Oh, I will do that.

And thank you all so much.

And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

And I hope your copperosity remains good as well.

Well, I hope that you have an upstreet sort of day.

And a jug full of sunshine or whatever it was.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Thanks a lot.

Okay.

We’d love to hear from you, too.

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