[lg policy] Birthday of "OK"

[Harold Schiffman]

 Happy 179th, OK!
[image: 4302OB]
<http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/files/2018/03/4302OB.jpg>

Allen Walker Read (Columbia U.)

March 23 marks the most important anniversary in American English. It’s the
179th birthday of America’s greatest word: OK.

OK Day isn’t a holiday — at least not yet. We don’t celebrate it with
banners, salutes, toasts, poems, or parades. But that’s OK.

In fact, as we go about our business on March 23, we hardly notice the big
day at all. No harm done, though; it’s still OK. And that’s one reason that
OK is our greatest word.

We happen to know an unusual amount about the birth and early years of OK,
thanks to the painstaking research of Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.
Actually, “pleasure-taking” would be more accurate, since Read, a professor
at Columbia and the leading expert on historical American English,
delighted in poring over long-ago newspapers and other publications. Long
before the internet, he was a human precursor of an electronic search
engine, indefatigably reading through volumes of old publications, whether
on microfilm or paper.

Thanks to Professor Read, we have a picture of the very birth of OK. It was
on Page 2 of the *Boston Morning Post* of Saturday, March 23, 1839. In the
course of an involuted and somewhat obscure running joke about the
Anti-Bell-Ringing Society (a group of young men who actually opposed a
recent city ordinance prohibiting the ringing of dinner bells at
lunchtime), the editor, Charles Gordon Greene, inserted the remark “o. k. –
all correct -.”

The joke implied a compliment for readers who knew enough about spelling to
realize that “all” doesn’t begin with o, and “correct” doesn’t begin with
k. So the meaning of “o. k.” would have to be the contrary of “all correct.”

It’s a joke, a paradox. The rest is linguistic history. (For the full
story, you can see my 2011 book
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ok-9780195377934?cc=us&lang=en&>, *OK:
The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word.*)

In Boston in those years, it happens that humorous abbreviations like
“o.k.” and “o.w.” (all right) were all the rage among newspaper wits. Soon
other Boston newspapers picked up “o.k.,” and soon after that the whole
nation, thanks to the mail exchange of newspapers that was a distant
antecedent of the internet.

The next year, “o.k.” gained further widespread use, co-opted as it was by
supporters of President Martin Van Buren, who formed “O.K. Clubs” in
support of his re-election. He was known as “Old Kinderhook,” after his
hometown, Kinderhook, N.Y.

Old Kinderhook lost to William Henry Harrison, but “OK” survived and
thrived. In December 1849 the *Boston Daily Times* celebrated it with a
116-line poem offering not just the “all correct” interpretation but nearly
two dozen others. Here’s a typical stanza:

The beauteous girls, unconsciously,
Kause many sad regrets,
They love so well to be o.k.,
Such orriblle kokettes!
I know of one whose flaxen hair,
Hangs down o.k., oll kurly;
Her lips the sweets of Eden bear,
And more, – she ne’er speaks surly.

What makes “OK” America’s greatest word, though, is the gradual
development, in the rest of the 19th century, of the meaning we use so
often today. Modern “OK” says that an arrangement or a procedure or an item
— whether a treaty, a lunch date, or a lawnmower — is at least
satisfactory. The genius of OK, reflected in the flawed spelling, is that
the matter under discussion need not be perfect, or even near-perfect, as
long as it meets the minimum standard at hand. If something is not OK, then
it just won’t do.

That’s why, when a friend asks if we’d like to go on a road trip, all we
have to do in assent is say “OK.” We don’t have to specify “wonderful” or
“I suppose” or “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Or if we repair a broken shoestring, the
question is simply, will it be OK?

If you think you can get through a day without saying OK, just try it this
Friday, March 23. I bet you can’t do it. OK?
>From the Chronicle of Higher Education 3/21/18

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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