Copacetic, Dude
Learned Vol. 5, Issue 3
This week: Can music help you learn a language? Sure. That’s it, that’s the newsletter. But, we can never let one word do when there’s a whole dictionary to exploit. So, let’s get into it!
Musically Inclined
Is listening to music a good way to learn a second language? I get asked this question a lot. And, the short answer is…sure! But, like with most things learning-related, context, goals, and your definition of good1 are the real key to answering the question.
When you set out to study a foreign language, you need to understand your own goals and motivations. For a lot of my students, studying is a practical thing. They’ll need to use English in some capacity in their future careers. For others, though, studying is a more relaxed, hobby-like pursuit. They might want to travel or read English novels, but they don’t have quite the same need to really study that the first group might. And so, for that first set of students, music is maybe not the most effective study tool. But, for the second group…
Let me explain. Imagine you don't speak English but that you're actively trying to learn it. You put on a 90s rock playlist of English songs and you come across this catchy-as-hell song called Bound for the Floor. The pre-chorus goes:
And you just don't get it, you keep it copacetic
You learn to accept it, you know you're so pathetic
There’s a word in the first line, copacetic. You’ve never heard it before, but you look it up. And it starts you down one hell of a weird rabbit hole. Is this a good way to learn English? Depends. Let’s say you’re in that first group of students mentioned above. You’ve got classes to take and tests to pass and you need to make sure your study plan is efficient and effective. Now, ask yourself these questions:
Is there anything in the lyrics that lets you guess the meaning from context?
Is it a word you think you'll need in order to accomplish your language goals?
Is the pronunciation used in the song likely to match the pronunciation provided by a dictionary?
No, no, and kinda sorta. But just getting to the point where you can answer the question is a lot of work, isn't it? It's a lot easier to enjoy the song, sing along to the chorus, and throw the double-goat horns in the air when the guitar and drums slam home. But maybe you’re that second kind of student, the one who’s just learning English for the sheer absurdity of it…
Local H had a minor hit with the song Bound for the Floor in 1996, when it debuted as the first single from the album As Good As Dead2. The video for the track wound up on heavy rotation during Mtv’s alternative blocks (usually late at night). And, for a brief window in time, it made copacetic a mainstream word. It's where I and my friends learned the word and it’s why, for about six months there in the mid-90s, everything my circle of friends stumbled upon either was, or was not, copacetic. But copacetic faded from our collective vernacular by the time the aughts rolled around and it’s never really made a comeback. And, as such, it’s not really everyday vocabulary, anymore. Right?
Well, call it due diligence, but in the interest of checking my assumptions, I looked it up on the iWeb corpus, and found that not only is copacetic not that common, it doesn’t even break into the list of English’s 60,000 most commonly used words. Yeah. There are 60,000 words you’ll hear more frequently than copacetic.
But, as long as I'm doing my due diligence, let's throw some more facts out there. First, you guessed it, our good friends at Merriam-Webster have this to say:
very satisfactory
Wow. Anyone else getting Mostly Harmless vibes3? But, again, due diligence, so it's on to the etymology and this...this is fun. Buckle in. From the same entry in Merriam-Webster:
Theories about the origin of copacetic abound, but the facts about the word’s history are scant: it appears to have arisen in African-American slang in the southern U.S., possibly as early as the 1880s, with earliest known evidence of it in print dating only to 1919. Beyond that, we have only speculation.
They go on to include some of the speculative theories, including the word arriving in English from Hebrew, through Yiddish, and another that the word originated in Creole, Italian, or Chinook pidgins. The kicker though, is the final theory, which says:
...the coining of the word to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who used the word frequently and believed himself to be the coiner.
A quick dive into Reddit's Etymology community provided a link to the Language Log website, which had this to say:
But, probably, a novelist coined the word. There is good reason to think that Irving Bacheller invented the word for a fictional character with a private vocabulary in his best-selling and later-serialized 1919 book about Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, A Man for the Ages. Despite extensive searches, and conflicting rumors, there is no known earlier attestation.
So, an author invents a word for a character to use and just a short 75 years later, a couple of musician's use it in a song, giving an entire generation a new piece of slang4.
Now, if you were learning English as a second language, is any of that detour into the history of copacetic going to help you on a proficiency exam? Not in the slightest. But, if you’re that second kind of student, the one who’s into a language for the long haul and willing to go down all the weird detours and scope out all the oddities along the way, then yeah, get some music in. It’ll teach you culture and vocabulary, grammar and social norms. It’ll anchor things in your memory that you might not need right now, but that will pop back up in the future suddenly affirming an understanding you didn’t even know you had.
So, to wrap this all up, is using music a good way to learn a language? Yeah. It’s fun, engaging, interesting, and relaxing. You might even say, as study methods go, it’s copacetic.
Stay curious.
Down the Rabbit Hole
My daughter is at the age where she’s starting to really understand and enjoy games. We’ve got a bunch of board games in the house and we have a bunch of board games on our Nintendo through a piece of software called 52 Games Worldwide. This game package contains a variety of classic board games, card games, and recreations of toy games (like mechanical racing games). It’s a lot of fun. Except for when it isn’t. Like when I can’t beat the computer at a simple children’s game I learned how to play 40-something years ago.
All of which is preface to say that this week, I fell down the rabbit hole of solved games. From Wikipedia:
A solved game is a game whose outcome (win, lose or draw) can be correctly predicted from any position, assuming that both players play perfectly. This concept is usually applied to abstract strategy games, and especially to games with full information and no element of chance; solving such a game may use combinatorial game theory and/or computer assistance.
As an example, think of Tic-tac-toe. As long as the players play by the accepted strategy, there will never be a winner. Or think of the game I was playing, Connect Four. If you know the strategy, whomever goes will win. Which explains a lot. Like how the stupid computer kept beating me by going first…
Anyway. Here’s an article in the Washington Post and a discussion on Reddit that expand the rabbit hole.
From the Archives
I’ve been toying with signing up for a couple of online courses. I don’t have the time, but the number of interesting courses and online classes is just exploding. It seemed like a good time to look back at the last time I wrote about this kind of thing, which was Learned Volume 3, Issue 48: DIY MA, which came out just over a year ago in February 2021.
I'm going to bury this caveat down here in the footnotes - if you've been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you'll know that I very rarely endorse one method of learning over another. There's what works for you in your personal context and then there's everything else. That said, finding what works for you takes time, effort, and careful thought. Most importantly, it takes a lot of experimentation, so, if you're setting out to learn a new language, take all advice as well-intentioned noise and do what works for you.
It is a great record. Especially given that Local H is essentially Scott Lucas and whomever he happens to have playing drums for him (Joe Daniels at the time). That said, Fritz's Corner is a straight banger and still lives in heavy rotation in my personal music pantheon.
Mostly Harmless is the 5th book in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy (don't ask). I'm not going to spoil anything here because if you've never read the Guide, you owe it to yourself to do so. And, if you have read the Guide, well then you know, you know?
Between you and me, Reader, this is exactly the sort of nonsense I showed up for. It's these weird little histories and connections that got me into etymology and linguistics. Because, the simple fact is, English is such a weird and expansive language that these little histories are everywhere.
I love this song, LOL. Giving big Airheads vibes.