Kishkumen wrote:I hear you, Chap. I am in no way copacetic with lying.
(my emphasis)
Kishkumen, don't do that to me! When a classicist like you uses a word I have never, ever, heard before, I frantically riffle through what Latin and Greek remains active in my skull, in the hope that I shall be able to find a plausible root. Nary a one came to mind. Now I find this in the Oxford English Dictionary:
U.S. slang.
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Fine, excellent, going just right.
1919 I. Bacheller Man for Ages iv. 69 ‘As to looks I'd call him, as ye might say, real copasetic.’ Mrs. Lukins expressed this opinion solemnly... Its last word stood for nothing more than an indefinite depth of meaning.
1926 C. Van Vechten Nigger Heaven 286 Kopasetee, an approbatory epithet somewhat stronger than all right.
1934 Webster's New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang. Copacetic, capital; snappy; prime.
1934 J. O'Hara Appointment in Samarra (1935) i. 24 You had to be a good judge of what a man was like, and the English was copacetic.
1935 N. Ersine Underworld & Prison Slang 29 Copissettic, all right, okay.
1937 Amer. Speech 12 243/1 ‘Everything is copesetic’..is synonymous with ‘O.K.’, and I believe it is used by negroes in the South.
1947 Down Beat 18 June 4 (heading) Torme not all copa-setic.
1969 Down Beat 20 Mar. 18/1 We hear two city cops chatting. ‘Well, everything seems copasetic,’ says one. ‘Yeah, we might as well move on,’ the other agrees.
U.S. slang indeed!
Kishkumen wrote:This thread has forced me to reconsider my assessment of Nibley. While I still feel that his vision of Mormonism had a lot going for it, and his criticism of Mormon society and Mormon leadership was salutary, I can no longer say that I trust him as a scholar, even in his peer-reviewed articles. It is actually quite a blow.
I am sorry to hear that you had that experience. I gave up my religion simply because I thought it was probably not true. I never felt I had been tricked, deceived, or lied to. That cannot be a nice feeling.
Markk wrote:In other words a "hack?"
One of the least interesting kinds of argument that takes place on this board is whether a particular denigratory epithet (a 'boo-word' as opposed to a 'hurrah-word') should or should not be applied to somebody or other - for example, is somebody a d**k or just an a*****e. But I shall stand out against 'hack' for Nibley. A 'hack', metaphorically applied to people from a term for a rather dull working horse that is OK for riding but not for hunting or jumping, refers in a literary context to an unoriginal person who just churns out what their bosses want. That was not Nibley, whatever else he may have been. He was an original, of a kind.