Dear Word Detective: I couldn’t find “copacetic” in your archives. My parents, both born in the 1920s, used it as a synonym for “hunky-dory” (which I did find in the archives … thanks for that). The most common usage would be to describe a good situation, as in “Everything is copacetic.” I suspect the word may have been popularized, if not coined, during WWII, and I have wondered if it might have been derived from the Latin “copia” (plenty), thus signifying that things were exceedingly good. Do you have any details on its origin? — Gary, Fort Worth, TX.
A few, but first I must remind you of the motto of our archives at www.word-detective.com: “Just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” As a matter of fact, “Copacetic,” meaning “fine,” “good” or “excellent,” is in the archives, right after “Crotchety” and “Cumshaw.” Yes, I seem to have a slight problem with alphabetization. But in my own defense I must note that I code that page by hand, and the HTML code behind web pages strongly resembles the strings of gibberish (%$*@!!!) used in comic-strips to represent swearing.
In any case, since this is nearly the tenth anniversary of my “copacetic” column, we’ll reprise my findings, or lack thereof. Your theory about the origin of “copacetic” being rooted in “copia” is, unfortunately, not really plausible because, if it were true, there would be a rather remarkable gap between the period when Latin was a common spoken language and 1919, when “copacetic” first appeared in print. While many of our English words are indeed derived from Latin, there are always numerous intermediate forms recorded through which their history can be traced. “Copacetic,” however, appeared pretty much out of thin air, although we can presume it was in oral use for at least a few years before someone wrote it down.
On the bright side, however, your theory makes more sense than some of the others floating around. One theory traces it to an Italian word “copissettic,” supposedly meaning “excellent,” another to a Creole-French word, “coupersetique,” or “able to be coped with.” Both are superficially plausible, but lack any evidence in their favor. The fact that “copacetic” first appeared in African-American usage, especially among jazz musicians, makes another theory, that the word is based on the Hebrew phrase “kol ba seder,” meaning “all in order,” more of a mystery than a believable explanation. Yet another theory, that “copacetic” came from the French phrase “copain c’est épatant!” (”Buddy, that’s great!”), seems as much a stretch as the others.
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, an African-American entertainer of the early 20th century, claimed to have coined the word (and he did certainly popularize “copacetic”). Although other sources cast doubt on Robinson’s claim, the implausibility of all other theories so far proposed makes one wonder if he might have been right.
“The fact that “copacetic†first appeared in African-American usage, especially among jazz musicians, makes”
the preceding theory, that it stems from the (presumably Louisiana-)Creole-French word, all the more plausible, since both were largely centred around New Orleans / Louisiana in that period. Early Jazz was strongly influenced by traditional Creole music, and many of those early African-American Jazz musicians were actually of Creole descent.
“coupersètique” has a few other advantages over the other suggested etymologies: it’s the only source word that carries a meaning of “acceptable [to people]“, which seems to be part of the context in which copacetic is almost always used.
The varying ways of anglicizing “coupersètique” align quite well with the recorded variations in pronounciation and spelling of copasetic, i.e., copisettic, copasetty, kopasettee.