Though there’s technically absolutely nothing wrong with writing ‘okay’ as ‘OK’ it’s an abbreviation that grinds many a folk’s grammatical gears – including this writer’s (though not as much as BBQ).
Not only does OK look uglier, lazier and shoutier than its elegant elongation, if you need to verb things up – okays, okayed, okaying – then that abbreviation gets really messy.
However, OK isn’t an even an abbreviation (of okay, at least), as OK actually came first.
Considering okay is a relative newcomer to the English language and one of its most widely used and versatile words (as well as probably the world’s most recognisable word in any language), there has been considerable debate as to its origins over the years. Among the most common (mis)conceptions was that it was born on the US Civil War battlefields as a military term meaning zero killed. Others have argued that it comes from the Latin omnes korrecta or the Greek olla kalla, both of which mean ‘all good’. Some said it could be traced back to the Scots (och aye) or the phrase okeh used by Choctaw, a group of Native American people from the southeast USA. Okay’s conception has even been attributed to a baker’s biscuit stamp, to shipbuilders branding wood with ‘outer keel’, and a Puerto Rican rum called ‘Aux Quais’.
However, risibly, the truth is that okay was born from a “lame joke” that went viral before viral was a thing. The widely accepted book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, by Allan Metcalf, credits Boston Morning Post editor Charles Gordon Greene with coining the expression in 1839. It was common in newsrooms at the time to create slang through abbreviated misspelt words like KG for ‘know go’ (instead of ‘no go’), or OW for ‘oll write’ (instead of ‘all right’) similar to our textspeak (like ‘OMG’) of today. And so, on Saturday, 23 March, 1839, in a tongue-in-cheek article about a satirical organisation called the ‘Anti-Bell Ringing Society’, OK appeared as an abbreviation of ‘oll korrect’, a deliberate misspelling of ‘all correct’, for the very first time.
OK showed up in another Boston Morning Post article a few days later and by the end of the year had appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript, New York Evening Tattler, and the Philadelphia Gazette. And so, it had already begun to sneak into American vernacular when the presidential campaign rolled around in 1840. The team for Democratic incumbent Martin van Buren came up with his nickname OK in reference to his hometown of Old Kinderhook and OK Clubs began springing up around the country. “OK now could have a double meaning,” writes Metcalf. “Old Kinderhook was all correct.” Soon rumours were also spreading that van Buren’s predecessor, Andrew Jackson, couldn’t spell and would sign his presidential papers with an OK believing it meant ‘all correct’. Within a decade, marking OK on business documents had become standard practice and telegraph operators were soon using it as way of acknowledging receiving a transmission. But ironically, though OK was invented by an editor, its use was widely resisted by the period’s leading writers like Mark Twain.
Acceptance finally came when it was used by Woodrow Wilson who served as the US president from 1913-21, but by then OK’s backstory had been lost and he believed it to have stemmed from the Choctaw word okeh so spelt it in the same way.
“With the source of OK forgotten,” writes Metcalf, “each ethnic group and tribe could claim the honor of having ushered it into being from an expression in their native language.”
OMG, Charles Gordon Greene must be LOL-ing in his grave.
Words – Jamie Christian Desplaces
