Re: linguistics...off topic (in memory of...)

In memory of the perfectly named Allen Read:

<A HREF="http://education.guardian.co.uk/obituary/0,12212,750027,00.html">Obituary</A> Allen Read

Classical scholar who sought out the origins of slang

Christopher Reed
Friday November 8, 2002
<A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/">The Guardian</A>

Despite being a distinguished etymologist and English professor at New York's
Columbia University for nearly three decades, Allen Read, who has died aged
96, was frequently just called "the OK man". Though sometimes tiring of the
description, he appreciated the irony of being linked to it, because he was
always a stout defender of colloquialisms and slang.

The tag originated in 1941 when Read confounded his fellow scholars by
discovering an older origin of the term "OK". He had left his job as a research
assistant at the Dictionary of American English, but decided to help out former
colleagues trying to pinpoint the origin of the term.

His findings discounted several theories. OK did not stem from "okeh" or
"oke", as used by the Choctaw native Americans; nor did it come from the Haitian
port of Aux Cayes, the Greek phrase "olla kalla", meaning "all good", or from a
tasty US army biscuit made by Orrin-Kendall. Scrutinising newspapers from the
1840s, which he knew to be the term's birth period, Read discovered that it
stood for "Old Kinderhook", a reference to the eighth US president, Martin Van
Buren (1837-41), a native of Kinderhook, New York. His supporters had called
themselves the Democratic OK Club, asking "Will you not say OK? Go ahead."

Later, Read found an even earlier use of the term. In an 1839 edition of the
Boston Morning Post, he came across the phrase "Ok, all correct", from a game
of using initials for common expressions. In a fad of the time, these were
often deliberately misspelt - for example, the term "no use" was written out as
"know yuse", and abbreviated to KY. OK, it transpired, stood for "oll korrect".

In 1963, Read wrote up his findings in a series of academic articles. He also
made important contributions to dictionaries, and wrote the entry for the
word "dictionary" itself in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But he was sceptical of
such books as arbiters of correct usage - they could, he wrote, become
"straitjackets that prevent the swinging, free enjoyment of the mother tongue".

One example against standards that Read liked to quote was the arbitrary
naming of the Rocky mountains, which had been known in 1804 as the Northern Andes,
and had subsequently been called the Stony, Shining, and even Enchanted
mountains.

As well as research papers and monographs, he wrote a number of books, the
best known of which was Milestones In The History Of English In America. He
loved slang and, in 1928, spent a holiday in the west collecting graffiti in
public lavatories. The results were published privately as Lexical Evidence Of
Epigraphy In Western North America: A Glossarial Study Of The Low Element In The
English Vocabulary. He warned that a preference for the Latinates "defecate,
urinate, and having sexual intercourse" was "indicative of grave mental health".

Read was born in Winnebago, Minnesota, got a master's degree from the
University of Iowa at the age of 20, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford.
He taught first at the University of Missouri, and, in 1945, moved to
Columbia, from where he retired in 1974. Since 1938, he had been compiling a
dictionary of what he called "Briticisms". Among them were explorations of "old bean",
"gent", "bloke", "toff", "cad", "chap" and "lad". His wife of 49 years, the
semantics scholar Charlotte Schuchardt, died in July. They had no children.
Allen Walker Read, etymologist, born June 1 1906; died October 16 2002

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Received on Wed Aug 27 16:26:52 2003