Kim and I occasionally watch foreign language films that are subtitled but not dubbed into English. I noticed English words that occasionally pops up. The most frequent word, which I heard several times in a Danish series we watched, is “OK.” Not surprising. (“O.K.,” or any word borrowed from another language, is what is called a “loanword.”) With a little digging, I learned that “O.K.,” and it’s O.K. to spell it “okay,” is the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet – loaned out around the world. (It makes me wonder what word is in second place.) If you don’t think so, start listening for this wonderful word. I did, and I hear it everywhere.
So – what does “O.K.” stand for? I won’t go into all the shades of meaning for this word – they are abundant, and you probably know most of them. What I’m more interested in right now is how that word got into the language in the first place. I imagined a simple abbreviation, like our current plague of acronyms, but language often does not move that simply – especially English.
We have to go back to the summer of 1838, when the expression first appeared in print. At the time, we are told, there was a fad in the United States that involved the use of what one author calls “comical misspellings,” along with forming abbreviations and acronyms based on colloquial speech patterns. From one source:
The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 ... and used expressions like OFM, "our first men," NG, "no go," GT, "gone to Texas," and SP, "small potatoes." Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, "oll wright."
The general fad is speculated to have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK's original presentation as "all correct" was later varied with spellings such as "Oll Korrect" or even "Ole Kurreck."
Combine these supposedly comical misspellings with abbreviations, and we get OK. So, this most common word owes its existence to a weird sense of humor that somehow caught on. How? The exaggerated misspellings I suppose made one feel superior to the poor spellers, and then the abbreviations made some folks feel superior to those who don’t know the code.
What’s striking to me is how weird our sense of humor can sometimes be. I get the part about using abbreviations as acronyms – we do far too much of that today, in my not altogether humble opinion. But “exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day”? I suppose that can be amusing, and then the misspellings become reduced to abbreviations. O.K., I learned, is an amusing abbreviation of “Oll Korrect.” Really funny, right?
Before I was enlightened I thought that such an omnipresent word as “O.K.” would have a more dignified origin – you know, maybe from Greek or Sanskrit or Old High German. Nope. It goes back to a clown named Ole Kurreck.
Here’s another theory on the origin of OK, quoted from Wikipedia: “In ‘All Mixed Up’, the folk singer Pete Seeger sang that OK was of Choctaw origin, as the dictionaries of the time tended to agree. Three major American reference works (Webster's, New Century, Funk & Wagnalls) cited this etymology as the probable origin until as late as 1961.
Perhaps . . . but I prefer “Oll Korrect,” mainly because it’s so stupid.
Tempting to conclude this post with something that includes the word, but I’ll resist.