OK and rhymes

[Wallace Chafe]

Just to throw a little extra wood on the fire, on two points that have been
circulating. First of all I don't think we'll ever know for sure the origin
of OK. All the explanations seem rather fanciful. But there's a Caddo
exclamation "ukkih" which means something like "wow!" and it probably
qualifies as well as most of these other suggestions.

I've been a little uncomfortable with the discussion of rhyming, which
makes it sound like some higher manifestation of artistic sensibility. It's
actually something that's arisen in certain cultures in certain ways, and I
don't see any reason to interpret it as an index of a culture's degree of
sophistication, or whatever. Native American "oral literature" has other
aesthetic values, and there's no reason to see an absence of rhyming as
some kind of deficit, or to think that people would have developed it if
only they'd been lucky enough to have a different kind of morphology.

--Wally