Everything's copacetic

I'm a word-addict.  I love word games.  I live for Boggle.  Bananagrams is my life.  My favorite part of Sundays is the NYTimes crossword puzzle.  I have no fewer than 10 crossword books in various rooms in my house -- one of which has 500 Sunday NYTimes puzzles!  I've always been a huge reader and I seem to have picked up all sorts of obscure vocabulary words and tend to get strange looks from people when I use them.  I never realize that I'm saying anything unusual!!  I have friends who teach linguistics here and one of these days I'm going to sit in on their classes.  My DH thinks I'm making words up since he is definitely not a word person.  I'm truly a geek but I come by it naturally -- my mother is like this, too.

So, I get a "word-of-the-day" e-mail every morning that gives a word, its definition and origin.   Today's word was "copacetic" (koh-puh-SET-ik meaning "very satisfactory" (or "it's all good" ☺)).  The origin is fascinating!  Apparently there is quite a lot of debate about it.  One prevailing theory is that Bill "Bojangles" Robinson made it up as a kid!  Others believe that it is a corruption of the Hebrew phrase "kol b'seder" which means "everything is in order."  They say that African Americans working in Jewish owned businesses in the early 1900s heard their bosses saying this and repeated it until it became a new word -- "copacetic."  Apparently it was most popular in the southern U.S., so some scholars have proposed that it was actually created in Atlanta! (Others don't believe any of this... ☺)

This is fascinating to me for many reasons:

1. I had no idea this was a made up word!  It's always been one of my favorites.  I'm not sure why, but it just seems to flow so well and it just makes me feel...well...like everything's copacetic!
2. My family came to the U.S. between 1905 and 1915 and were Jewish business owners in Atlanta in several predominantly African American communities.  They most likely would have spoken Ladino and not Hebrew amongst themselves, so it isn't too likely that they started this, but how cool?  I really need to look in my Ladino dictionary and figure out if there's a similar phrase.  (For those who don't know, Ladino is Judeo-Spanish -- it's mostly Spanish with a melding of Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, etc. It was spoken by Sephardic Jews (mostly Spanish origin).  As Yiddish is to most Jews, Ladino is to Sephards.)
3. Apparently it was a more popular word in the 60s.  Which just proves to me, yet again, that I was born in the wrong decade!!
4. When I asked my DH if he knew the word, he thought maybe it was related to "kaopectate" which just made me laugh.  ☺

Anyway, all this to say that I've decided that everything's copacetic around here.  I'm going to attempt to stop having daily mood swings from "eep, the world is coming to an end" to "I'm so happy!"  We'll see how that goes...


Yep, everything's copacetic.

ETA:  The word-of-the-day e-mail is from Merriam-Webster.  They also give you a daily word game (with lots of other games there as well).  My mother and I compare our times on the word games sometimes.  Yep, we're that geeky.  ☺