Etymologists can't agree on which of five hugely different origins explain the word "copacetic." Put it in Google and you'll find at least a dozen more theories.
There is some consensus that it was used commonly in a military context during World War II, carried forward in traditonal Southern Black culture and then the space program during the 60s.
There is agreement that the word has fallen out of general usage in the last 30 years.
I smiled when I read that. My grandfather died 35 years ago. He was a man of so few words that it only made sense he could take one of his favorites with him.
Considering I wasted some of the 10 years we shared as a pre-cognizant infant, it amazes me, a writer, how much someone who said so little (and wrote even less) influences and inspires me every day.
You gotta love a guy who, backed into a corner by his parish priest in order to allow his first daughter to be married in the church, entered the confessional for the first time in many, many years.
His faithful and pious wife waited in the pews with the rest of her children glancing side to side for the inevitable lightening strike.
He was in and out in under a minute.
As the priest told others later, my grandfather said "About those ten commandments, I never killed anyone. What's my penance?"
Make Gary Cooper a mid-sized German carpenter and you have my grandfather. Nothing fazed him. Nothing set him off course. His five children and 17 grandchildren never heard words of love, but it screamed in his simple, every day actions. His world truly was copacetic.
He never owned a car, but had his fishing boats custom built to his specifications. He himself built cottages at his favorite fishing spot for each of his children as they married. My older cousins remember hammering nails with him into the last cottage he built for my parents.
He never had a driver's license, but he was the first fire chief of the small community that grew up around those cottages. Everyone felt safe with Leo Mohn.
As I wrote a couple of days ago, the cottage he built for my parents is now back on the market and we made an offer contigent on the sale of our house here.
Friday morning, I got an email saying there was a serious buyer coming out to look at it. The cottage owner apologized and explained she would have to sell to the first cash buyer.
I was startled by the strength of my sadness. It was just a building I told myself over and over as I flooded the keyboard with tears and my friends' mailboxes with long, whining emails.
The first answer was from a friend of exemplary education and professional accomplishment.
I used to think I wanted to be him when I grew up. Accepting growing up is not likely an option for me at this point, I'd still love to have his sharp pen and uncanny word choice. He is both a readers' and writers' writer.
His answer gave me the obvious reassurances and said that things would be "copacetic."
On reading that I knew that, whether we got the cottage or not, things were going to be just fine.
He and Grandpa said so.
Copyright 2004 Judi Griggs