Speculation

[Joanne M. Despres]

I think part of the problem is that speculation can be more or less
informed, and it's often difficult for a seasoned etymological
researcher who's developed a good sense of linguistic reality to
convince a less experienced person that a particular hypothesis
really isn't credible.  For example, suppose a guy reading a Philip
Roth novel happened upon a word that inspired him to flip through
his Hebrew dictionary, and suppose, in doing so, he came upon a
Hebrew phrase that he realized sounded an awful lot like the as-yet-
unexplained Southernism  "copacetic," and that meant virtually the
same thing. Now, this might strike the average person as a
genuine discovery, and a very likely solution to the problem, but
somebody who's actually done etymological work could tell you
with no hesitation that (a) chance sound-resemblances, even
among semantically similar words, are legion and don't mean
anything in and of themselves and (b) the borrowing situation is just
too unlikely to be believed:  it's very hard to imagine how the
uneducated Christian southerners who first used "copacetic" would
have contact with the classical Hebrew phrase posited as its
source.  Of course, all sorts of explanations can be imagined to get
around the difficulties.  Maybe an evangelical preacher managed to
acquire a Hebrew grammar through a relative living in the nearest
city.  Or maybe an elderly rabbi suffered an attack of dementia,
wandered into the woods, and ended up being rescued by some
friendly hillbillies.  Anything is POSSIBLE, up to and including, I
suppose, direct implantation into the brains of a speech group by a
Hebrew-speaking colony of Martian invaders.  The trick is to
develop a sense of what's likely and what isn't based upon past
examples of word-formation and -adoption and the pattern of facts
you have to work with, which is what scholarly etymologists are
good at and amateur enthusiasts (with all due respect) are not.  In
the eleven years I've been observing Jim Rader's scholarly
etymological work at M-W, it's become crystal-clear to me that you
need to be very skeptical and very grounded in the factual to do
this work well.  If you're not, you'll end up wasting a lot of time
connecting hypothetical dots and spinning cobwebs.

Joanne Despres