WORDS TO LIVE BY
It’s all ‘right good.’
A friend mentioned that “right good” is a typical example of Cape Breton slang. While considered regional or old-fashioned by many dictionaries, “right good” is not slang.
Slang is often defined as undignified or vulgar language but John Ayto, editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Slang, warns many words exist in “that uncertain borderland between slang and colloquial usage. One person’s slang is another’s colloquialism.” (2003, v)
For example, a 1916 book warns readers not to use the following slang words: awful, bouncer, coed, fake, fan (as in a sports fan), grouch, hunch, kid, pub and rough house. (Merriam-Webster, “Slang goes legit”)
Some of these words still might not appear in formal writing, but they would not be considered slang.
In addition, “right good” has a long history.
The earliest record is “rihht god inoh” (right good enough) from the early 1200s (Oxford English Dictionary Online). What is a little odd about right good is that right is usually an adjective. Here it is an adverb intensifying the adjective good, the way the adverb “very” frequently does.
At the same time, this oddity happily survives in formal and prestigious phrases like the “right honourable,” “right reverend” and, in England, “right royal.”
Right good is one of the many examples of a phrase that originated in England but later fell out of fashion only to survive regionally.
It is found in the U.K., the U.S. and Canada —including Newfoundland, Nova Scotia’s South Shore and Cape Breton.
Incidentally, our research for the dictionary did not find enough evidence in Cape Breton for “some right good,” but the South Shore Phrase Book (1988) records this usage.
Like many human creations, languages are subject to fashion and change. Even Samuel Johnson, the famous arbiter of the English language, admitted that “It may be reasonably imagined, that what is so much in the power of men as language, will very often be capriciously conducted.” (The Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language, 1747, p. 14).