Allen Walker Read (June 2, 1906 – October 16, 2002) was an American etymologist and lexicographer. Born in Minnesota, he spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University in New York. Read's work Classic American Graffiti is well regarded in the study of latrinalia and obscenity. His etymological career included his discovery of the origin of the word "OK", a longtime puzzle, and his scholarly study of the history and use of the common English vulgarity "fuck."
Early life and education
Read was born in Winnebago, Minnesota to Orlan and Bessie Allen Reed on 2 June 1906. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Northern Iowa (called Iowa State Teachers College at the time) in 1925 and a master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1926. His thesis focused on Iowa place names.
Classic American Graffiti
Read's first extended work, Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary, describes and collates examples of bathroom graffiti observed by Read on a road trip throughout the Western United States in 1928. The book was privately published at his own expense in Paris in 1935, since its extensive inclusion of vulgarity was considered too obscene by American publishers. Even then, the printing was limited to 75 copies and contained a disclaimer that it should be "restricted to students of linguistics, folk-lore... and allied branches of social science." Read wrote in a foreword: The work was described as a prototypical "model study" of latrinalia that "deserves the attention of any serious student of American language" in a 1979 review, which noted that even then it remained hard to access and "excessively rare." It contains some of the earliest documentation in English of words used by the homosexual community, although Read never recorded the word "gay", implying that the term was not used to mean homosexual during this time period. The work also contained Read's concept of the inverted taboo, in which some people delight in vulgarity because of its illicit nature.
Other work
From 1938 onwards, he worked intermittently on a dictionary of Britishisms, but was never able to complete it during his life. During World War II, he did his service with the Military Intelligence Division, working on the American Military Definition Dictionary and Military Phrase Books. This achievement was described as "the pinnacle of his career" to "envious fellow etymologists" by The Economist, but Read considered it just "an agreeable diversion from his main work."
Read also successfully traced the origins of the words "dixie" and "podunk", and managed to attribute the first use of "the almighty dollar" to Washington Irving. He wrote the entry for "dictionary" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.