Wordstalks 3: Unetymologizable

I have a thing for hot peppers, surprisingly for someone with as sensitive a digestion as mine. But no, this post isn't going to be about food and digestion! I'm just telling a story. One evening last week while I was fixing dinner and got too hungry, I munched down on a dried jalapeno to hold me over - and soon concluded that it wasn't the best thing to have gone for! I mentioned something about it to Phil and he said, 'Oh, honey, that's about the least copacetic thing you could have eaten, isn't it?'

'Copacetic?' ???

It stopped me in my tracks. I'd never heard that word before! One of the great pleasures of being a word nerd with a background in linguistics and a very intimate knowledge of Latin, Ancient Greek and some others, is that ordinarily, if ever I hear an unfamiliar word, especially technical or botanical, I can etymologize it pretty much instantly and figure out what it means.

'Copacetic.' I tried several different segmentations and parsings. I was stumped. That 'co' on the front and that 'tic' at the end were so teasingly, beguilingly Latinate, so maybe I could make head and tail of it but without a body, head and tail did me little good!

Usually I read dictionaries for pleasure, not to look up a word, but 'copacetic' sent me to the dictionary. And I found myself in good company: no one knows its etymology and it's classified as early-mid 20th century American slang! It means 'in good order,' 'agreeable,' 'ok.' Even the spelling isn't nailed down - it can be spelled 'copasetic' too (although my spellchecker doesn't like that spelling).

Phil gave me some contexts in which he'd heard it. He said that it was mostly in the context of army guys -  'Wanna go down to the burger place in twenty?' 'Yeah, that's copacetic.' 'Do you have time to take care of this mess over here?' 'Yeah, that'd be copacetic.' 

He suggested, and I'd suspected this too on the basis of my dead-end-etymologizing, that someone had made it up to sound like a clever long word and then just used it a lot facetiously.

So, 'copacetic' is now a fairly frequently used word around our household, always with a big smile and tongue in cheek!

And, of course, it's a major fillip for my Philip - he rarely gets to stump me with a word!