Allen Walker Read

From Philosopedia

Charlotte and Allen Walker Read, general semanticists

Read, Allen Walker (1906 - 16 Oct 2002)

A distinguished lexicographer, philologist, and professor of English at Columbia University, Read once wrote,

• The word ‘'god'’ is not needed in an explanation of human or nonhuman affairs. All sentences in which the word '‘god’' is used in first-order usage are either invalid or obfuscatory in the same way that all calculations in which zero is multiplied result in zero.

The ex-Iowan scholar is known for being an expert on British and United States slang as well as having pinpointed the first usage of “O.K.,” for which William Safire and other linguists often cite his scholarship. He is cited by the Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) for also having traced the origin of “Dixie,” “Podunk,” and ”Rebel Yell.” He has traced “You know,” the ubiquitous interjection used when an individual is searching for what to say next, to 1835, citing evidence that it was “a phrase an Englishman throws in at the turn of every sentence, when he is hunting for a new idea, or the words to fill the coming one.” His research has shown that the word gay did not exist in its contemporary meaning of homosexual before the 1950s.

Classic American Graffiti, Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America (1935) was Read’s first work, published in Paris and issued privately in seventy-five copies. A glossarial study of the low element in the English vocabulary, it is a masterpiece of latrinalia. For example, in a Banff, Alberta, latrine in 1928 he recorded the following:

Oh! I wish I had the balls of a stallion

and a prick of a fellow I know.

I would flee to the highest church steeple

and I would piss on the people below.

Another of his gems, found in a toilet:

When you want to shit in ease

Place your elbows on your knees

Put your hands against your chin

Let a fart and then begin.

Read’s study included the shocking-for-some four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, along with such others as balls, clap, puss, bone, dose, hose. It included a quote from a Pompeii wall (around 79 C.E.): Hic ego puellas multas futui. The author’s unembarrassed reporting as to how folks folksily communicate on a vulgar, not just a formal and informal level, caught the appreciative eye of lexicographers as well as the disapproving eye of bluenoses.

One of his Columbia University students, Warren Allen Smith '49, wrote:

• Finding that we both were graduates of Iowa State Teachers College, Dr. Read invited me home to his beautiful Claremont Avenue apartment after class one day. Upon meeting his wife, Charlotte Schuchardt Read, I learned both were active in the Institute of General Semantics. First, Allen and I shared memories of Iowa, both saying something to the effect that we were glad we were from Iowa, with an emphasis upon the preposition. And he took me into his den that, instead of books from floor to ceiling, was filled with furniture to store his thousands of 3" x 5" cards, upon which he had written notes taken over the years concerning slang and usage. A student, I was nonplussed that he had spent so much time copying what had been written on toilet walls wherever he had traveled. In class he was British-professorial and spoke without notes to the point that one wondered if they were hidden or were copied onto his shirt cuffs. His humor was inward, and although we laughed aloud he didn't seem to. Ask a question, and he gave long but precise answers.

Read has been president of the Dictionary Society of North America and the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Married to the Alfred Korzybski expert Charlotte Read, he is a longtime advocate of secular humanism and is a member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York.

Read died in 2002, rating an obituary in The Economist.