Its last word stood for nothing more than an indefinite depth of meaning.Ī Man for the Ages, by Irving Bacheller, 1919.ĭid Mr Bacheller invent the word, as has been suggested? Possibly. Lukins expressed this opinion solemnly and with a slight cough. “Now there’s the kind of a man! Stout as a buffalo an’ as to looks I’d call him, as ye might say, real copasetic.” Mrs. Leaving theories aside, the first clear sighting of the word is in a biography of Abraham Lincoln, very popular in its day: We may agree that most of these suggestions are extremely implausible. Yet other accounts say it derives from a Chinook word copasenee, “everything is satisfactory”, once used on the waterways of Washington State, or from the French coupersetique, from couper, “to strike”, or from the French phrase copain(s) c’est épatant! (“buddy(s), that’s great!”), or, in a hugely strained derivation, from the cop is on the settee, supposedly a hoodlum term used to describe a policeman who was not actively watching out for crime, and so one who was OK. But he certainly did a lot to popularise the word.Ī more frequent explanation is that it derives from one of two Hebrew phrases, hakol b’seder, “all is in order”, or kol b’tzedek, “all with justice” it is suggested these were introduced into the USA by Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants. But other blacks, especially Southerners, said later that they had heard it earlier than Mr Robinson’s day. Indeed, he claimed to have invented it as a shoeshine boy in Richmond. The name of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a famous black tap-dancer, singer and actor of the period round the turn of the twentieth century is commonly linked to this belief about its origin.
One suggestion that’s commonly put forward is that it was originally a word of the African-American community in the USA. Dictionaries are cautious about attributing a source for it, reasonably so, as there are at least five competing explanations, with no very good evidence for any of them. In the words of ground control at Houston, everything has been “copacetic” - a term of undetermined origin which means perfect.īut even in the USA it doesn’t have the circulation it did thirty years ago. All in all, copacetic is certainly a real word To summarize, ‘copacetic’ originated in the 1920s and means something that is absolutely satisfactory. The first stages of the flight of Apollo 10, like most of the flights that led up to it, have gone like clockwork. In short, 'keep it copacetic' means working together peacefully in order to reach a common goal without any issues or disagreements. Local H wasnt the first to use the word copacetic, but they are the only act to chart with a song that features the word in the. People mostly become aware of it in the sixties as a result of the US space program - it’s very much a Right Stuff kind of word. It’s rare to the point of invisibility outside North America. It’s possible that this word - meaning that something is in excellent order or satisfactory - has created more column inches of speculation in the USA than any other apart from OK.
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