Allen Walker Read (June 2, 1906 – October 16, 2002) was an American etymologist and lexicographer, best known for his studies into the words "okay" and "fuck."
Read was born in Winnebago, Minnesota, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Northern Iowa (then called Iowa State Teachers College) in 1925, a master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1926, and studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from 1928 to 1931. He was a chaired professor at Columbia University in New York City from 1945 until 1975. He is a past president of the Semiotic Society of America (1980).
He was a repeated contributor to American Speech by 1931; his first extended work, Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary, was privately published in Paris in 1935 since its description of bathroom graffiti was considered too racy for American publishers. It was eventually published in the United States in 1977, under the title Classic American Graffiti, ISBN 0-916500-06-3.
He married Charlotte Schuchardt in 1953. They remained together until she died in July 2002. He died in New York City three months later. They had no children.
Famous quotes containing the words allen, walker and/or read:
“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)
“The clock runs down
timeless and still.
The days and nights turn hours to years
and water in a gutter marks the circle of another world
hating, resentful, and afraid
stagnant, and green, and full of slimy things.”
—Margaret Abigail Walker (b. 1915)
“There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans—who were not allowed to learn to read and write—and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)