NY Times News Service
"Have you had enough?" the questioner asks.
"I'm good," is the reply.
"Would it be all right with you if ...?"
"I'm good with that."
"Are you sure you don't need a sweater?"
"I'm good, Ma. Quit buggin' me."
Here we have one of the basic words of the English language -- originally used in the place of God to avoid irreverence -- gaining currency in an unremarked new sense.
Early on, I'm good meant "I am without sin," but that is now seldom the meaning. In later centuries, good -- followed by the preposition "at" -- acquired a utilitarian sense, as in "I am good at whist, as well as at hand-held computer games." When followed by the preposition "for" (meaning "in place of" or "with the purpose of"), the adjective good became the hyphenated adjective and noun good-for-nothing. Recently, it acquired the phrasal meaning of "readiness," good to go.
The sense we examine today is a response to a question about capability or mood. "I'm good" means "I can handle it" or "It doesn't trouble me"; its implied ensuing preposition is "with," as in "It's all right with me."
You may ask: "Why do I have to know this? It's a nonce usage, kids' talk, likely to disappear from their vocabulary in a trice" (nonce, from the Middle English "for then ones" compressed to "then once," now meaning "for the time being" or "transitory." Trice, sailors know, is a single yank at a rope that hoists a sail). You don't have to clutter your head with the etymology of nonce or trice, which I found in the fourth edition of the editor Michael Agnes' Webster's New World Dictionary, but the newest sense of good is important to know lest we lose intergenerational communication.
Remember how those of us in the language dodge examined the slang sense of bad as an antonym of good? That usage, pronounced as a sheeplike ba-a-a-d, was first noticed here 22 years ago. Many readers thought it would pass through the body of language like a dose of salts.
Webster's New World now includes badder, baddest in the slang sense of "very good, stylish, effective." The fourth edition of Joseph Pickett's larger American Heritage Dictionary, in one of its many useful usage notes, observes: "While it is of Black English origin, this usage has been recorded for over a century," which illustrates "a favorite creative device of informal and slang language -- using a word to mean the opposite of what it `really' means. ... What is more unusual is for such a usage to be generally accepted within a larger community. Perhaps when the concepts are as basic as `good' and `bad' this general acceptance is made easier."
Yeah, I'm good with that analysis of the semantic flip. In a few years, other lexicographers may add the latest informal sense to the ancient word "good": "satisfied by; untroubled with; prepared to find acceptable."
If I'm right, the new usage will be with us not just for the nonce, but for good. If mistaken, I made my bad and will have to lie in it.
EPISTLE DEDICATORY
The dedication page in most books is sincerely unimaginative. John Zubal, the Cleveland antiquarian bookseller who occasionally ships me a box of old language books to donate to the Syracuse University library, sent along Dedications, a 1913 anthology that shows how the dedication page began in ancient obeisance of authors to their royal patrons or ecclesiastical protectors, then bogged down in platitudinous salutes to family members "without whom ..."
Ben Jonson, the often-panned playwright who was Shakespeare's contemporary, was having none of such obsequiousness or sentimentality in 1631: "To the Reader, if thou be such, I make thee my patron, and dedicate the piece to thee. ... Fare thee well, and fall to. Read."
Benjamin Disraeli, in his 1826 Vivian Grey, added a note about his readership: "To the Best and Greatest of Men, I dedicate these volumes. He for whom it is intended, will accept and appreciate the compliment. Those for whom it is not intended, will do the same."
Here is Mark Twain in 1897, writing self-mockingly in a copy of his Following the Equator: "This book is affectionately inscribed to my young friend Harry Rogers, with recognition of what he is, and apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of The Author."
That last is an inscription, a personal form of a book's dedication and the most valuable of all to the recipient. Even as the printed dedication page shows a lack of creativity, now and then a personal inscription shows a flash of personality. The director Alfred Hitchcock signed a biography about him with a cartoon of himself; the poet Ogden Nash, master of the unexpected rhyme, signed a collection of his poems "to an interviewer whose heart is pure" (the author of a book about mistakes in grammar signs his "with every best wishes").
Why do readers, or at least buyers, line up to have books signed by authors on book tours? One reason is that the author may someday become famous and that that signed copy of the book will become a rarity, selling for a bundle. A better reason is that an inscription, especially with the reader's name included, establishes a remote bond with the author, making the book a collector's item unlikely to be thrown or given away. If that's so, shouldn't authors give more attention to the printed dedication page, aiming it not just to the specific dedicatee but personally relating it to many of the other readers?
I once appeared on a television panel with the novelist James Michener and took along a first edition of Tales of the South Pacific, his first book, for him to sign.
He said: "I'll be glad to, but there's something you should know. What you have here may be a great rarity -- the only unsigned copy."
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