oomis, I’m a fan of your posts and I don’t want to come across as negative or critical so please take my disagreement as a matter of academic interest, and nothing else. I’ve studied history extensively and etymology a little, with broad non-academic interest in both. I’m familiar with primary source material from the US military during the second word war, from American historians like Stephen Ambrose and Carlo D’este and ex-soldiers like E.B. Sledge, where many US soldiers are quoted, and I’ve seen the word used several times. It must be understood that there were virtually no speakers of colloquial, conversational Hebrew outside of Israel before the 1950’s, and the word copacetic definitely showed up before that. Also, from an etymological point of view, there isn’t much difference in usage between “he’s cool” and “it’s OK”. Finally, had you considered that a US soldier hearing an Israeli saying Hakol Beseder, as you suggest, simply misheard a hebrew phrase for an already extant colloquially used word in American english, and that is the extent of it, a similarity?
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