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:
“Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)
“When and where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?”
—Margaret Abigail Walker (b. 1915)
“For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)