American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  A few years ago some person accused Amos Kendall to General Jackson of being no better than he should be. “Let me examine the papers,” said the old hero. “I’ll soon tell you whether Mr. Kendall is right or wrong.” The general did so and found everything right. “Tie up them papers,” said the general. They were tied up. “Mark on them O.K.,” continued the general. O.K. was marked on them. “By the eternal,” said the good old general, taking his pipe from his mouth, “Amos is oll kurrect and no mistake.”1

  This tale was circulated by the other anti-Locofoco papers, and soon even the Democrats, at least outside New York, were believing it, sometimes with fantastic variations. To this day it is a tradition in Tennessee that Jackson, while serving as clerk of the court in that State, marked O.K. on legal papers approved by the judges. Investigation has discovered the following in the records of Sumner county:

  Wednesday the 6th of October 1790.

  Andrew Jackson, Esqr. proved a bill of Sale from Hugh McGary to Kasper Mansker for a negro man which is O.R.

  How anyone could have ever mistaken this O.R. (order recorded) for O.K. is hard to imagine. In American Speech for April, 19411 Woodford A. Heflin printed a photographic facsimile of the page in the court docket; only the briefest examination of it was enough to show that the letters are O.R. Moreover, Mr. Heflin showed that the entry is not in the handwriting of Jackson, but in that of Daniel Smith, the actual clerk of the court. Jackson, as a matter of fact, was never its clerk, though he served as public prosecutor.2 Various other jocose etymologies for O.K. were suggested during the year following its first appearance in the New York New Era, for the term seized the fancy of the country, and was soon in wide use. So early as December 18, 1840, a Philadelphia music publisher named George Willig was copyrighting “The O.K. Quick Step,” “composed and arranged for the piano-forte and especially dedicated to the citizens of Richmond, Va., by Jos. K. Opl.” Willig’s son, George, Jr., operated a music publishing business in Baltimore, and before the end of 1840 he brought out an “O.K. Gallopade,” “dedicated to the Whig ladies of the United States by John H. Hewitt.”3 It will be noted by this dedication that O.K., at least outside New York, had already lost its exclusively Democratic significance. On April 2 the New York Daily Express, referring to the fact that the O.K. boys who raided the Whig meeting were overcome and expelled, said that it was an Arabic word which, read backward, came to kicked out.4 On April 11, after an election in Connecticut in which the Democrats had been bested by the Whigs, the Express reported that O.K. meant Old Konnecticut. Says Read, from whom I have taken the foregoing:

  Another Whig version, soon current, was out of kash, out of kredit, out of karacter and out of klothes. Some months later a congressman from Illinois, on the floor of the House of Representatives, offered the interpretation orful kalamity.1

  Many efforts have been made, both before and since the appearance of the Read paper in the Saturday Review, to trace O.K. beyond 1840, but so far they have produced no convincing evidence. In 1911 a contributor to Notes and Queries2 reported that he had found it in the will of one Thomas Cumberland, dated December 8, 1565 and entered in the Archdeaconry Court records in London, but it is highly probable that the letters were only the initials of the scrivener. Again, Albert Matthews reported in American Speech in 19413 the discovery of O.K. in books by Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, published in London in 1593 and 1596 respectively, but, as he pointed out, it was used as a noun and in some unknown sense that manifestly had nothing to do with the modern sense.4 Yet again, there is a report of its occurrence in a Massachusetts muster-roll of 1757,5 but an investigation by Matthews has revealed, as Read says, that the alleged O.K. “is not O.K. at all, but an ill-written Att., standing for Attestation or Attested by.”6 Once more, there is its apparent appearance in a letter from John Richardson to John Porteous, dated Oswego, N. Y., September 23, 1789, a copy of which is in the Public Archives of Canada at Ottawa.7 The passage refers to the building of a schooner, and in the transcript is as follows:

  Her floor Timbers, Keel, Keelson, Stern and Lower futtocks are O.K. The Transoms, Stern Post, upper port of stern, Upper Futtocks, Top Timbers, Stern Timbers, Beams and Knees are all red cedar.

  Unhappily, I have had no access to the original letter, but it seems to me to be highly likely that the word here transcripted as O.K. must be really oak, and in that judgment the Ontario Historical Society acquiesces, for it makes the word oak in a print of two Richardson letters1 in its Papers and Records.2 Finally, there is the apparent presence of O.K. in the travel diary of William Richardson, who made a journey from Boston to New Orleans in 1815.3 This diary was published privately by William Bell Wait, president of the Valve Pilot Corporation of New York, in 1938.4 The entry is that for February 21, 1815, and appears in the printed diary as follows: “Arrived at Princeton, a handsome little village, o.k. and at Trenton where we dined at 1 P.M.” A reference to the original manuscript5 shows that this transcription is not quite accurate. What Richardson actually wrote was: “Arrived at Princeton, a handsome little village, 15 Mil. from N. Brunswick o k, & at Trenton, where we dined at 1 P.M.” The passage shows three corrections and as it originally stood was apparently as follows: “We this day dined in Princeton, a handsome little village, 15 Mil. from N. Brunswick, & Arrived & at Trenton, where we dined at 1 P.M.” “We this day dined” is struck out and “Arrived at” written above it, and “& Arrived” is struck out and o k inserted above. What, precisely, did the author mean? Thus the reply of Heflin:

  To answer this satisfactorily, it is first necessary to reconstruct the words that have been scratched out to see if ok stands for anything deleted. This I have done with the aid of Miss Mary Charlotte Lane, a competent decipherer of handwriting at the University of Chicago. The passage, we believe, was originally written in two stages. The first went as follows: “We this day dined in Princeton, a handsome little village, 15 miles from N. Brunswick, & arrived.” At this point Mr. Richardson, who evidently was writing up his journal some hours after the events had occurred, suddenly realized that he had dined at Trenton instead of at Princeton. So he went back and crossed out “We this day dined in” and wrote in above these words “Arrived at.” Then, returning to the end of his unfinished sentence, he observed that “& arrived” was now redundant; so he crossed the words out, and set an “ok” above them. The second stage of the writing then followed: “& at Trenton, where we dined at 1 P.M.” Thus the passage was completed, making “at Trenton” parallel in construction with “at Princeton.”1

  Heflin argued plausibly that “the o k of the manuscript looks like O.K.”, that “it does not stand for anything scratched out in the manuscript,” and that “it makes sense if interpreted all well,” and concluded that it should be accepted as a genuine appearance of the term, earlier than any other that has been authenticated. I was inclined to the same conclusion myself at the time he wrote, though not altogether convinced,2 but on reflection I began to develop doubts. They revolved around the possibility that Richardson, who survived until 1867, may have revised his manuscript after the appearance of O.K.3 in New York in 1840, as recorded by Read. To my eye, at least, the letters ok show a certain difference in handwriting from the rest of the diary. Somehow, they look more mature. Moreover, even if they are accepted as the equivalent of the printer’s stet, as Heflin suggests, they leave the entry in confusion, for what it then shows is “Arrived & at Trenton, where we dined.” There is likewise the possibility that what seems to be ok may actually be two other letters. This was suggested in an editorial note in American Speech in April, 1941, appended to the Wait paper lately cited:4

  After N. Brunswick, where the words & arrived are crossed out, Richardson started to interpolate a handsome little village, as that idea was in his mind, but after getting as far as a h he discovered that he had already used that phrase earlier in the sentence with reference to Princeton. He went no farther in the word, and his attention was attracted to something else before he got t
he letters crossed out. This o k is really therefore the first two letters of a handsome.1

  Altogether, the problem of Richardson’s ok presents difficulties, but it is perfectly conceivable that O.K. may have arisen from some source other than Old Kinderhook, and got itself forgotten before the New York Locofocos began to use it. Not a few competent authorities look forward hopefully to its discovery in some unchallengable situation before 1840. One of them is Dr. Louise Pound, who surmises that, at least in academic circles, it may have been borrowed from the first letters of the Greek phrase (ola kala), long in use among teachers of Greek “to mark the deserving themes of their pupils.”2 Such dual origins are by no means unheard of in philology.

  The Read discovery, of course, has not abated the efforts of amateur etymologists to account for O.K., and to the ten guesses at its origin that I listed in AL4, pp. 206 and 207, new ones are being added all the time. I offer a few of the more picturesque or preposterous:

  1. That O.K. comes from aux quais, used “in the American War of Independence by French sailors who made appointments with [American] girls.”3

  2. That it may be derived from oikea, a Finnish word signifying correct.4

  3. That it arose during the Civil War, when “the War Department brought large quantities of crackers from the Orrins-Kendall Company. This company always put their initials on their boxes and as the crackers were of a high quality the initials gradually came to be used as a synonym for all right.”5

  4. “Certain bills in the House of Lords must be read and approved by the Lord Chairman of Committees, Lord Onslow, and by his counsel, Lord Kilbracken, and then initialed by them. They are then O.K.”1

  5. “O.K. had its origin several hundred years ago in an expression common among Norwegian and Danish sailors: H.G. (pronounced hah gay), meaning shipshape, ready for action. H.G. was short for the Anglo-Saxon hofgor, meaning ready for the sea.”2

  6. “Liddell and Scott have an entry, , a magical incantation against fleas. The authority is a work called ‘Geoponica,’ the date of which is given, with a query, as 920 A.D.”3

  7. “The Prussian general Schliessen, who fought for the American colonies in the War of Independence, endorsed his letters and orders O.K. (Oberst Kommandant). Consequently the letters O.K. came to be applied to anything having the meaning of official assent.”4

  8. That O.K. may have some sort of connection with the Scotch och aye.5

  9. “O.K. is an abbreviation of orl korrec, all correct. It is English, I think Cockney — not an Americanism. I was born in the 60s and remember it when I was a boy.”6

  10. That O.K. may come from O qu-oui, an emphatic French form of yes, to be found in Sterne’s “A Sentimental Journey,” 1768.7

  Of all Americanisms, O.K. has been the greatest success. It has been borrowed by virtually all civilized tongues, and also by many lower down the scale. Partridge says that it became naturalized in England as an adjective c. 1880 and as a verb by 1900, but other authorities put its adoption further back. Sir William Power, for example, has recorded that it was in use by English telegraphers, as a signal that a message had been clearly received, so early as 1873, and has called attention to the fact that it first appeared in an English slang dictionary a year earlier.8 At some indefinite time before 1888 it was already familiar enough to the patrons of London music-halls to enter into the refrain of a popular song.1 But it remained for the American movies to make O.K. familiar to all Englishmen, low or high. When the young of the land began to use it in place of the English righto, there were the usual loud protests from patriots and pedants, but they were without effect. An especially violent war upon it opened in 1935, and Mrs. Nicholas Murray Butler, who was then in London, lent a hand to its opponents by denouncing it in a letter to the London Daily Telegraph,2 but it was then too late to stay the tide, for, as she had to confess, she had heard it “used in an English drawing-room” and had found it “in the Oxford Dictionary.”3 Before the end of the year the London Times heaved a bomb into the patriot ranks by giving its awful O.K. to O.K. The London Morning Post and a few die-hards at Oxford and Cambridge held out,4 but the jig was up, and when H. W. Horwill brought out his “Dictionary of Modern American Usage”5 he did not think it necessary to explain O.K., or even to list it. During this same annus mirabilis the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decided formally that inscribing O.K. upon a legal document “meant that the details contained … were correctly given.”6 Some of the lower judges were greatly shocked by this decision, and a few of them continued to forbid the use of O.K. in proceedings before them, but they were engaged upon a forlorn hope. On June 22, 1936, the London bureau of the New York Herald-Tribune reported:

  Rebuking a witness in a Chancery Court suit here who replied “Okay,” Justice Sir Albert Charles Clauson7 said today: “Because you have been to America there is no need to say okay. If you want to say yes, say yes. Speak

  Walking in the Zoo, walking in the Zoo, The O.K. thing on Sunday is walking in the Zoo.

  See also O.K. in History, by M. E. Durham, London Spectator, Jan. 14, 1938, p. 57. English in this court, if you don’t mind.” The witness assented, but to the next question he replied: “That’s quite okay.”

  A year later the Edinburgh Evening News1 was describing O.K. as “now universal” in Great Britain, and in 1940 a provincial journalist was reporting that “almost everybody says O.K. now instead of all right.”2 The American troops, when they began to arrive in England, found that this was, if anything, an understatement. Finally, on September 30, 1941 Lord Beaverbrook made O.K. impeccable by using it at the Moscow Conference in a formal pledge as official representative of the British Commonwealth of Nations. But let him tell his own story:

  It was at that meeting that Stalin’s demands were finally formulated.… The interpreter began solemnly and anxiously to read out each item. But there was little need for his services. The lists were familiar to us. We had studied them for long. Most things we were ready to supply, and the answers came straight from Harriman3 or me. He said “Agreed” if the item concerned the United States. I said “Okay” when Britain was producing the supplies.4

  It was seldom, indeed, during World War II that American troops, though they ranged the earth, encountered a people to whom O.K. was unknown. Lieut. Col. W. E. Dyess, in his narrative of his captivity by the Japanese after Bataan, recorded that it was known to and used by every guard in their Davao prison-camp.5 Similarly, it was familiar to the Moslem allies of the Allies in North Africa.6 Before World War II began the American volunteers in the Spanish civil war found that it had displaced salud as a greeting among the village children of Spain.7 Nor should it be forgotten that the case before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, before mentioned, originated in faraway Burma. In several places O.K. seems to have encountered congeners which coalesced with it, e.g., ola kalla in Greece, meaning all right.8 In Liberia the local analogue, in the Djabo dialect, is o-ke. Says Charles Blooah, a Liberian, in American Speech:9

  An inferior addressed by one superior in age is expected to reply in rather brisk and short accords at the conclusion of each of a series of orders or instructions, in a successive fashion, o-we, o-we, etc., to show that he is giving strict attention to all that is being spoken. At the conclusion of the entire series of instructions the inferior must reply with a summarizing o-ke. This indicates that there is perfect accord between him and the superior. O-ke has something of the force of the German ja wohl, when given in reply to the bidding of a superior.

  O.K. is sometimes spelled okeh, okay, or okey, and about 1930 an abbreviation, oke, appeared,1 quickly followed by oke-doke (more often oky-doke), oky-doky and oky-dory. The forms terminating in y were perhaps suggested by all-righty, which had a vogue at about the same time, and maybe oky-dory was also influenced by hunky-dory, an Americanism traced by the DAE to 1868. The late Woodrow Wilson used okeh in O.K.ing documents, and seems to have subscribed to the theory2 that the term came from a Choctaw word, oke, hoke,
signifying yes, it is. This etymology is accepted as “probable” by Webster’s New International, 1934, but there is no evidence for it.3

  Thornton and the DAE establish the approximate dates of the first appearance of large numbers of other political Americanisms. The DAE shows that the familiar American use of administration as an adjective began soon after the opening of the Nineteenth Century. It traces administration paper (i.e., newspaper) to 1808, administration man to 1810, administration candidate to 1827, administration party to 1837, and anti-administration to 1834. Administration, as a noun signifying the executive arm of the government, seems to be of American origin also, for it appeared in Samuel Sewall’s diary in 1716, whereas the first recorded English use of it is dated 1731. In the sense of the term or terms during which a President holds office, as in first administration, etc., it is unquestionably an Americanism, and the DAE’s first example is from Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796. The English have borrowed more or less, in recent years, all of these terms in administration, as they have also borrowed campaign in the political sense. Their own word for pre-election political activity is canvass, but they know what campaign means, and often use it. The DAE traces it in this country to 1809. At the start it was commonly preceded by electioneering, but in a little while it was being used without explanation. Most of its derivatives, rather curiously, did not come in until years later. The DAE traces campaign-document to 1871, campaign-speech to 1880, campaign-manager to 1882, campaign-club to 1892, campaign-orator and to campaign to 1896, campaign-button to 1900, and campaign-fund to 1905. All of them are undoubtedly measurably older than these dates indicate, but they do not seem to have been in use before the Civil War. Affiliation and to affiliate, in the political sense, are traced by Thornton to 1852, and anxious-seat to 1842. The latter, in the meaning of the bleachers provided for converts at revivals, goes back to the great Methodist campaigns of the 20s and 30s, as does anxious-bench, but it did not come into political use until later. Mourner’s bench is traced by the DAE, in the revival sense, to 1845. Like anxious-bench and amen-corner it was borrowed by the politicians somewhat later.