4pm:"O.K." et alia
Allen Walker Read in 1988
(From The New York Times)
Allen Read, the Expert of 'O.K.,' Dies at 96
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Allen Walker Read, a playful prospector of the American tongue who hunted down the source of words like Dixie and Podunk, phrases like the almighty dollar and, most famous of all, those ubiquitous initials, O.K., died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.
A longtime English professor at Columbia University , he demolished a host of theories about the origin of O.K., an Americanism adopted by virtually every language and one of the first words spoken on the Moon. The original source was not a misspelling by Andrew Jackson or a Choctaw Indian word or a superior brand of Army biscuit or a variety of other possibilities.
Rather, its first known published appearance with its current meaning came in The Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839: "o.k. all correct." It appeared at a time when initials, preferably of misspelled words, like "oll korrect," were the fad. "K.Y." meant "no use" ("know yuse"), but that did not catch on.
Mr. Read solved the "O.K." mystery in a series of articles in American Speech in 1963 and 1964, causing "much gnashing of teeth by other etymologists, who had themselves lusted for the laurels of `O.K.,' " according to an article by Michelle Stacey in The New Yorker in 1989.
But Mr. Read did not appreciate having "O.K." overshadow the hundreds of other etymologies he divined. He loved showing how words travel curlicue courses, the mapping of which sheds light on how people think and live. In tracing how the Rocky Mountains came to be called the Rockies, he learned that in 1804 they were the Northern Andes.
His achievements included contributions and commentaries in Funk & Wagnall's, Random House and other dictionaries; being an editor of the Dictionary of American English; and writing the entry on "dictionary" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He wrote scores of research papers and monographs, and his several books included "Milestones in the History of English in America," a collection of essays published this year by the American Dialect Society.
He was a professor of English at Columbia from 1945 to 1974 and was head of many linguistic organizations, including the International Linguistic Association.
Mr. Read saw words as playthings and told The New Yorker that "jubilance is an explanation for a lot of the things that happen in language." He loved and studied slang, euphemisms, pig Latin, double talk, adult baby talk and graffiti. Exuberant, obviously impromptu words like blustrification and discombobulate delighted him.
He once compiled names that natives of Connecticut have called themselves, including Connecticotians, Connecticutensians and Connecticuties, the last reserved for pretty girls.
In 1928, on a sightseeing trip through the western United States, he collected graffiti from public restrooms and privately printed the results in 1935 as "Lexical Evidence of Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary."
In the book, he wrote, "That anyone should pass up the well-established colloquial words of the language and have recourse to the Latin `defecate,' `urinate,' and `have sexual intercourse,' is indicative of grave mental health."
He was born in Winnebago, Minn., on June 2, 1906. His father, who taught all the sciences at Iowa State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, encouraged him to pursue an academic career.
He graduated from his father's college at 19 and at 20 earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa, writing his thesis on Iowa place names. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He taught at the University of Missouri and the University of Chicago before going to Columbia.
In 1926, while teaching at Missouri, he hitchhiked to Estherville, in western Iowa, to search out the origin of the word blizzard. It had originally meant sharp blow or volley, as in a blizzard of shot from a gun. He learned that a man called Lightnin' Ellis had first used the word for a snowstorm in 1870, in the local paper. Within 10 years, it had spread throughout the Midwest.
Mr. Read loved such hunts. He traced Dixie to a minstrel show in New York City in 1850 and Podunk to an Indian name meaning "where there is a sinking," or a swamp. He found that Washington Irving laid claim to the first use of "the almighty dollar," though a Philadelphia newspaper used it around the same time.
H. L. Mencken, whose writing on the American language inspired Mr. Read, wrote about the Podunk discovery in The New Yorker in 1948.
"Allen Walker Read," he wrote, "probably knows more about early Americanisms than anyone else on earth."
In 1953, Mr. Read married Charlotte Schuchardt, the director of the Institute of General Semantics, an educational center and publisher in Brooklyn. General semantics is a branch of linguistics founded by Alfred Korzybski in the 1930's that theorized that words are abstractions that draw attention away from the particularity of the things they represent.
Mrs. Read died this July, and Mr. Read has no survivors, Robert R. Potter, a friend, said.
Mr. Read did not finish the Dictionary of Briticisms he had worked on since 1938, when he won a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue the project. He believed that there had been many works on how British English continued to influence American English after the Revolution, but none that did the reverse.
In an article in The American Oxonian in 1938, Mr. Read wrote, "It is to be hoped that the work will abound with extracts of a racy, human quality."