Copacetic

Copacetic (pronounced koh-puh-set-ik)

In slang, fine; completely satisfactory; OK.

1919: An Americanism said to be of utterly obscure origin, the entirely speculative attributions of the word to Cajun (Louisiana) French, Italian, Hebrew, African American English, Yiddish, barracks Latin or even gangster slang all lack any supporting evidence.

Given that the English language offers: pleasant, satisfactory, acceptable, enjoyable, attractive, tempting, appetizing, cordial, OK, nice, fine, likable, sweet, cheerful, convivial, satisfying, amusing, agreeable, pleasing, pleasurable & amiable, copacetic filled no obvious gap although it was said by some (without evidence) to be specific to a mood, or relationship without problems.  The richness of the English vocabulary meant there were already plenty of ways of saying that and women have anyway long been skilled in loading the word “fine” with just a change of inflection, covering the spectrum from the first, fine careless rapture of love to homicidal loathing.  Copacetic wouldn’t seem to improve on that but some tried to get it to catch on, the alternative spellings including copasetic, copesetic & copesettic.  Copacetic is an adjective.

Obscure and unnecessary, copacetic exists mostly as a fetish word discussed between consenting etymologists and lexicographers in the privacy of their chat groups.  It does occasionally appear in literature or other places, either because the author is searching for linguistic variation or just as the type of flourish Henry Fowler (1858–1933) condemned in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) as a “pride of knowledge”, something he thought “a very unamiable characteristic”, the display of which “sedulously should be avoided”.  In other words, except between word-nerds, copacetic need not be used (because there are so many alternatives) and should not be used (because most won’t know what it means).  Knowingly or not, most seem to have followed his advice.  Henry Fowler, although disapproving of much, may have been more tolerant of another wilful display of the obscure: Oojah-cum-spiff.   Oojah-cum-spiff (all right; fine) appeared in PG Wodehouse's (1881-1975) novel Very Good, Jeeves (1930), possibly as an alteration of oojah-capivvy, Wodehouse's interpretation of an Indian or Persian expression of uncertain origin.  Wodehouse remains something of a nerdish cult but oojah-capivvy is now as rare as copacetic.

As far as is known, copacetic appeared first in the novel A Man for the Ages (1919) by Irving Bacheller (1859-1950).  The author had a character, noted for her idiosyncratic speech, twice use the word and added it and “coralapus” were “her peculiar property” and “prized possession”.  Coralapus vanished without trace but copacetic has never quite gone away, the novelty attracting journalists, headline writers and songsmiths but the place it was first embedded was elaborated African-American speech, especially among those associated with jazz music and by the 1930s, it was regularly included in dictionaries of US slang and etymological discussions in literary journals.  At this time, the speculation seems to have begun, one of the earliest claims of origin by a gentlemen from Milwaukee who claimed it was from the Cajun (Louisiana) French couper-sètique (able to cope with), the correspondent even providing a couplet from “a charming old Acadian poem.”

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, during an "RU OK?" moment, Los Angeles, 2012.

However, this theory gained no support.  Also dismissed were other suggestions of origin including the Chinook Jargon copasenee (which seems actually to exist in Chinook Jargon), the Israeli Hebrew hakol beseder (all is in order (in a transliteration from the pointed spelling ha-kōl bĕ-sēdher)), a calque on expressions in European languages such as the German alles in Ordnung, the Polish wszystko w porządku and the Russian vsë v porjadke.   All were debunked by one authority or another and the consensus is that Irving Bacheller simply coined the word for his character in the manner of the malapropisms Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) created as comic devices for his Mrs Malaprop in the play The Rivals (1775).  What supports this perhaps disappointing conclusion is that Mr Bacheller had a bit of previous in such coinings, the construct of copacetic presumably a blend of the Latin copia (plenty) + ceterum (otherwise, in other respects).

Couplet

Couplet (pronounced kuhp-lit)

(1) In literature, most often in poetic form, a pair of successive lines of verse, usually rhymed and of the same metre.

(2) A pair; a couple.

(3) In musical composition, any of the contrasting sections of a rondo occurring between statements of the refrain.

(4) In computing, a pair of interdependent programming statements.

(5) In the induction or exhaust systems of internal combustion engines, a pipe running between main tubes for the purpose of flow-balancing.

(6) In town planning and traffic management, a pair of one-way streets which carry opposing directions of traffic through gridded urban areas.

(7) In taxonomy, a pair of two mutually exclusive choices in a dichotomous key.

1570-1580: From the Middle French couple (a little pair), the construct being couple from the Old French couple, from the Vulgar Latin cōpla, from the Classical Latin cōpula (doublet of copule) + -et from the Middle French and Old French –et from the Medieval Latin –ittus (Suffix indicating diminution or affection).  Couplet was used first in poetry in the 1570s and in music since 1876.  Later adoptions all emerged in the twentieth century or later.

Closed and Heroic Couplets

A rhyming couplet is two lines of around the same length which rhyme and complete one thought.  Rhyming words are those of a similar sound when spoken; they don't of necessity have to be similar in spelling.  A couplet is closed when the lines form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence whereas a heroic couplet is written often in iambic pentameter, though with some variation of the meter.

A closed couplet from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Several characteristics distinguish the heroic couplet from the regular couplet. A heroic couplet is always rhymed and is usually in iambic pentameter and is also usually closed, meaning that both lines are end-stopped and are a self-contained grammatical unit.

This rhymed, closed, iambic pentameter couplet from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 is not however a heroic couplet.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

That’s because for a couplet to be heroic, it demands a heroic setting.  The subjectivity inherent in this is why satirists were attracted to the form, using the heroic form when writing of the mundane or banal; the Dadaists being the twentieth century’s most celebrated practitioners.

This fragment is from John Dryden's translation of Virgil's The Aeneid, and because it’s one of the dramatic epic poems of antiquity, these are heroic couplets. 

Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join'd;

But westward to the sea the sun declin'd.

Intrench'd before the town both armies lie,

While Night with sable wings involves the sky.

Like many seminal literary forms, the heroic couplet attracted parody, known in literary theory as the mock-heroic, most commonly associated with Alexander Pope, his best-known example of this work of this kind being The Rape of the Lock in which a minor transgression is written of in a narrative of epic proportions, recalling the legends and magic of mythology.

Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey,

Dost sometimes Counsel take—and sometimes Tea.

In a case which legal commentators described as "speculative" and "optimistic" Lindsay Lohan in 2011 sued Rapper Pitbull (Armando Christian Pérez, b 1981), objecting to some lines in his single Give Me Everything (2011), the offending couplet being:

Hustlers move aside, so I’m tiptoein’, to keep flowin’

 I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan.

Rapper Pitbull.

Grounds for the suit were the negative connotations in the text and claims she should have been compensated for the use of her name in the song.  The suit sought unspecified damages for characterizing her as a person who has been to jail, when actually she is a professional actor, designer, and devotee of charitable causes. It was alleged the lyrics were clearly “destined to do irreparable harm” to Lohan’s reputation.  The case was dismissed by a federal judge who ruled the words were protected by the First Amendment, which covers freedom of speech and creative expression.

Elegiac

Elegiac (pronounced el-i-jahy-uhk or el-i-jahy-ak or ih-lee-jee-ak)

(1) Used in, suitable for, or resembling an elegy.

(2) Expressing sorrow or lamentation.

(3) In classical prosody, a technical classification noting a distich or couplet the first line of which is a dactylic hexameter and the second a pentameter, or a verse differing from the hexameter by suppression of the arsis or metrically unaccented part of the third and the sixth foot.

(4) An elegiac or distich verse.

(5) A poem constructed in such distichs or verses.

1575-1585: From the Middle French élégiaque, from the Latin elegīacus (poem or song of lament) and the Ancient Greek ἐλεγειακός (elegeiakós) (from the earlier eleigeia).  In ancient Greece the verse form was associated with laments and other mournful tunes.  The meaning “pertaining to an elegy or elegies” emerged in English in the 1640s while the loosened sense of “expressing sorrow, lamenting” dates from the turn of the nineteenth century.  The adjective elegiacal was first used in the 1540 as a technical term in the sense of “of meter”.  Elegiac & elegiacal are adjectives and elegiacally is an adverb.

A technical rule in poetry

In the study and practice of poetry, the elegiac is that said to be written in the form of elegiac couplets.  It’s a highly technical definition, understood and applied (critically rather than deconstructively) by a handful of specialists in the field: An elegiac couplet consists of one line of poetry in dactylic hexameter (a stressed (or long) syllable followed by two unstressed (or short) syllables, repeated five times to create a pentameter line) followed by a line in dactylic pentameter (a hexameter with six feet).  In Text thus constructed, purists insist, each foot needs to be a dactyl (a long and two short syllables), but, since antiquity, the classical meter has always tolerated the substitution of a spondee (two long syllables) in place of a dactyl in most places; technically the first four feet can either be dactyls or spondees.  Got it?

Among critics, the dactylic hexameter is regarded as the higher form because, since antiquity, it has been the structural framework of the epic whereas the elegiac form was thought both less demanding and more popular.

Yates & Auden.

In Memory of WB Yeats by WH Auden (1939)

 

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

 

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

 

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

 

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

 

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

 

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

 

III

 

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

 

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

 

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

 

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice;

 

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

 

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

 

Although written by WH Auden (1907-1973) as a tribute to WB Yeats (1865–1939), the work is also something of a reflection on the nature of poetry.