All may not be OK with the usage of OK

If one were to meet someone who doesn’t speak a word of English, then what is the one ‘English’ word that most of them probably do know? Almost certainly, it’s OK.

The folks at the Merriam-Webster dictionaries speculate that ‘OK’ is ‘very probably the most widely recognized word in the world’. It is certainly also one of the most versatile words in the world. It can be used as a noun: ‘I got his OK on it’; as a verb: ‘Did Mumbai Indians OK the deal with Hardik?’; as an adjective: ‘I thought the actor did an OK job on the role’; as an adverb: ‘My son seems to be getting along OK in the new job’; as humorous slang, such as ‘I’m fine, just okey-dokey’; or as an interjection in two ways: to denote compliance (‘OK, I’ll do it before the end of the day’) or to convey agreement (‘OK, that is fine’).

OK conveys subtle nuances too. As an adjective, OK really means ‘adequate’ (‘The boss approved this draft, so it is OK to send out.’); or ‘acceptable’ as a contrast to ‘bad’ (‘It’s OK to accuse your opponent of dishonesty when he routinely misrepresents your record.’). It can also mean ‘mediocre’ when used in contrast with ‘good’. (‘The dosas were great, but the sambar was just OK.’). It fulfils a similar role as an adverb (‘Not bad, you did OK for your first time speaking in public!’). OK, as an adjective, can express acknowledgement without approval. In spoken form, it can also be used with the appropriate voice tone to express doubt (‘OK?’), to convey reassurance (‘Everything will be OK’), to admonish and warn (‘Don’t tell anyone else about this, OK?’), to reflect cynicism (‘He cheats shamelessly but thinks it’s OK as long as no one finds out.’), or to seek confirmation (‘Is that OK?’). OK is not just understood all over the world, even where English isn’t spoken; the clincher is that it was even the first word spoken on the Moon.

But the funny thing—indeed the most astonishing thing of it all—is, as Merriam-Webster tells us, is that the etymology of the word ‘OK’ reveals that its origin is ‘literally a joke’.

According to two people who have researched the word— yes, it took two scholars of eminence to study how this two-letter word came about—the term was invented in the United States (where else?) in an 1839 article in the Boston Morning Post. According to research by the historian Allen Walker Read, as reflected in the 2010 book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, by Allan Metcalf, the word’s roots originate in a bit of jocular text—a suggestion by a Boston newspaper to their counterparts in Providence, Rhode Island, to sponsor ‘a party for some boisterous Boston lads who might be stopping by’. This jokey text, borrowing from the prevailing fashion of deliberate misspellings (coupled with the newer fashion of abbreviating popular phrases to acronyms) rendered ‘all correct’ as ‘oll korekt’—and summarized it as ‘OK’.

Before you wonder how such a trivial joke caught on, it’s important to understand that both the craze for abbreviations and for misspellings were the 1830s newspaper equivalents in those days of the trivialities that ‘go viral’ on social media nowadays. First, says Read, came the abbreviations of common expressions, including RTBS, ‘remains to be seen’, GTDHD, ‘give The Devil his due’, OFM, ‘our first men’ (a satirical description of Boston’s leading citizens), and SP, ‘small potatoes’ (for something considered to be of little importance). Then came the deliberate misspellings (like ‘kewl’ and ‘rite’ so beloved of adolescents today) which also had their equivalents then, turning no go into know go and no use into know yuse—which when abbreviated, as the abbreviation fad required, made no go into ‘K.G.’ and turned know yuse into ‘KY’. ‘Enough said’ became ‘nuff ced’ and was abbreviated to ‘NC’. In the same way, the expression all right was deliberately misspelled as oll wright and became O.W., as an abbreviation. And all correct became oll korekt—hence o.k.!

Here’s where the plot thickens, according to Metcalf. OK did become one of the more commonly used expressions, but it’s fair to point out that since all the other abbreviations cited above have passed into oblivion, how come OK survived and achieved global glory? The answer apparently lies in the US presidential election of 1840, when President Martin Van Buren was nicknamed ‘Old Kinderhook’ after his hometown of Kinderhook, New York. As a result, Van Buren fans organized themselves into ‘OK Clubs’ across the country, further popularizing the word. Merriam Webster tells us that as a result many wrongly attribute the origin of the word to ‘Old Kinderhook’, when it really should be credited to the jocular Bostonian editor who came up with ‘oll korekt’. But the double-meaning that Van Buren was both ‘OK’ (by nickname) and OK (because he was right for the country) entrenched the term in the American consciousness, and from there it was not an enormous leap to its global spread.

Metcalf dismisses all the other ‘origin stories’, but details many of them, including alleged sources in various other languages, notably Latin, Greek, Scottish, French, Finnish, and Anglo-Saxon via Swedish, with two African languages, Mandingo and Wolof, also being credited. The list includes the following theories that OK originated: from the Choctaw-Chickasaw okah meaning ‘it is indeed’; from a mishearing of the Scots och aye! (or perhaps Ulster Scots Ough aye!), ‘yes, indeed!’; from West African languages like Mandingo (O ke, ‘certainly’) or Wolof (waw kay, ‘yes indeed’); from Finnish oikea, ‘correct, exact’; from French au quais, ‘at the quay’ (supposedly stencilled on Puerto Rican rum specially selected for export, or a place of assignation for French sailors in the Caribbean); or from French Aux Cayes (a port in Haiti famous for its superior rum). Other, perhaps more far-fetched, explanations suggest that OK comes from an abbreviation for: Open Key, popularized by early telegraphers; Old Keokuk, the name of a Native American Fox chief; the German ranks Oberst Kommandant, Colonel in Command, or Ober Kommando, High Command, because German army officers fought alongside the colonists in the American Revolution; the name of a freight agent, Obadiah Kelly, whose initials often appeared on bills of lading; or the initials of Orrin Kendall biscuits supplied to the Union Army during the Civil War.

The most creative and widely-believed story claimed it was one more thing that the white Americans looted from the Natives they had displaced in America. According to this theory, OK was a contraction of the Choctaw word okeh, which President Andrew Jackson allegedly stole (along with much of their land) from members of the Choctaw tribe. This theory was taken so seriously that President Woodrow Wilson, a former head of Princeton University before ascending to the nation’s highest office, reportedly wrote okeh on papers he approved. When asked why he did not use O.K., he replied, like the stern professor he used to be: ‘Because it is wrong.’

Unfortunately for him, it was he who was wrong. O.K. was the real original. Which means that spelling O.K. as okay is also, strictly speaking, ‘wrong,’ though writing OK (without the old-fashioned full stops in between) and even choosing the lowercase ok are also acceptable, and indeed more popular. OK?

(Excerpted with permission from Aleph Book Company)