[Ads-l] Antedating of "Copacetic"

[Shapiro, Fred]

The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for the word "copacetic" or "copasetic" is from Irving Bacheller's 1919 novel A Man for the Ages.  The Bacheller book has proven to be very difficult to antedate.

Now the lexicography and research team of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English has uncovered prior use of this word (in a spelling variant):

1918 Urbana (Illinois) Daily Courier 10 July 4/7 (Newspapers.com)  Reports Crops Favorable.  R. C. Lindsey made a trip to his farm west of Pesotum last night and reports everything as being "copesthetic."  Ceph made the trip in his new flivver and claims it to be a fast little scamp.

I have found another antedating, also a spelling variant, as well:

1919 Chicago Defender 26 Apr. 9/1 (Newspapers.com)  Jimmy Nelson and Ben Harris put on a Virginia ham supper at their cafe last Friday night, without beans, and every one went home feeling copathetic, whatever that means.

I regard this as an antedating of the OED's 1919 cite because the first mention of the serialization of A Man for the Ages in the papers covered by Newspapers.com was on June 25, 1919.

It seems that "copacetic" in one of its spellings may have been coined in Illinois.  I also wonder whether the word, which was later popularized by the famous Black entertainer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, might have originated in the African-American community.  My primary basis for such speculation is the early occurrence in the Chicago Defender Black newspaper.

Fred Shapiro

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