It would be a mistake to claim that OK caused the American philosophies of pragmatism in the nineteenth century and tolerance in the twentieth. But OK has become an expression of both—a concise, poignant, and constant reminder.
OK as a touchstone for tolerance goes back to that best-selling book published in 1967: I’m OK, You’re OK by Thomas Harris. The book was about the kind of psychology known as transactional analysis, first popularized by Eric Berne’s 1964 book Games People Play. The particulars of transactional analysis have faded from public awareness, but the simplified message conveyed by Harris’s title thrives as a basis for present-day tolerance of diversity and hence acceptance of self. Thanks to that title, the two letters OK have acquired the power to make us feel good about ourselves, deserving or not.
That’s relatively new territory for OK. It was around for more than a century before Harris’s book gave it a new spin. And I’m OK, You’re OK couldn’t have happened to an ordinary word. But OK is anything but ordinary in its form and in its history.
The OK Taboo
O.K. (or OK or okay) is widely used on every level of speech and on all levels of writing except the stodgiest. Unless you are taking freshman English, you can use it freely.
—Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage
OK has so many oddities that it is hard to tell which is the oddest. But a leading candidate for oddest, surely, is the taboo against using OK, or even its more conventional respelling okay, in formal discourse.
When OK first appeared, it must have seemed not quite suitable for polite company. It wasn’t sacrilegious or obscene, like certain other four-letter words that even nowadays are banned from broadcast. But it did have low associations, with people (purely hypothetical) whose knowledge of spelling was so poor that they would actually spell “all correct” oll korrect, and also with the rowdy Tammany ruffians of the OK Clubs in the 1840 election.
It had the stigma of slang, not for what it meant or how it was pronounced but because it was a deliberately blatant, stupid misspelling. As such, it was attributed, in jest or otherwise, to ignorant people, to be avoided by those who wanted to be considered cultured.
Whatever the reason, OK never made it to the pages of most of the better nineteenth-century authors. It’s not surprising that you won’t find OK in the works of, say, Henry James. But it’s not even used by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, who wrote about low characters and used their slang. And when OK slipped once into the works of Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott, it was removed in subsequent editions.
That’s no longer the case. The dialogue used by many authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries freely includes OK. And though it has a lengthy entry in the recent Historical Dictionary of American Slang, few people nowadays think of it as slang. Nevertheless, despite its ubiquity, it remains strictly excluded from whole genres and many books.
You will look in vain through the inaugural addresses of the presidents of the United States, even as informal a president as George W. Bush, for a single instance of OK. Similarly, you can page through volume after volume of scholarly publications without turning up an OK, except in reports of conversations.
To take a more extreme example, consider the Bible. In more than three-quarters of a million words, OK doesn’t show up even once in most English versions.
You wouldn’t find OK in the original Hebrew and Greek, of course. Nor could OK have appeared in the King James Version, published in 1611, more than two hundred years before the invention of OK. But there are now many contemporary English translations, including ones in colloquial language, and they too avoid OK.
There’s one exception, the colloquial translation called The Message. But even it has only one OK from the entire Hebrew Bible and only one, repeated once, from the New Testament, both in dialogue:
“I don’t care; let me run.” “Okay,” said Joab, “run.” So Ahimaaz ran.… (2 Samuel 18:23)
The voice came a second time: “If God says it’s okay, it’s okay.” (Acts 10:15)
“Then I heard a voice: ‘Go to it, Peter—kill and eat.’ I said, ‘Oh, no, Master. I’ve never so much as tasted food that wasn’t kosher.’ The voice spoke again: ‘If God says it’s okay, it’s okay.…” (Acts 11:7)
A more conventional translation of the latter, from the New International Version, is “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
There’s no mystery why OK isn’t often employed in the Bible. Aside from being insufficiently dignified, it’s too neutral. Imagine the story of the Creation in the Hebrew Bible with OK instead of “very good”:
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was OK. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
(Genesis 1:31)
The Presidential OK
Because we hesitate to use OK in formal situations, it’s rare to find it in a presidential speech on a serious issue, but it’s not impossible. Here are a few examples from Barack Obama’s public speaking. He used OK in speaking to schoolchildren on September 8, 2009:
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.
That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures.
Generally, however, official presidential OKs are few and far between. It is only when speaking informally that OK occurs in the transcripts of President Obama’s remarks. Interrupted at a rally on health insurance reform at the University of Maryland on September 17, 2009, he said, according to the official transcript,
(audience interruption) What’s going on, guys? We’re doing OK. Relax. Everybody is all right. We’re doing fine. (Applause)
And later in that speech:
You just heard Rachel’s story. She’s OK right now, she’s thriving.
At a joint press conference with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper on September 16, 2009, President Obama opened the questioning with this:
OK. All right, Ben Feller.
Later that month, finishing a press conference at the G20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh, he used OK to make sure there were no more questions:
OK? Thank you very much, everybody. I hope you enjoy Pittsburgh.
The Word That Shouldn’t Have Been Born
OK. Now, think for a moment of a world without OK. By all odds, that should be the world we inhabit. Maybe the oddest thing about OK is its mere existence.
OK wasn’t needed. It wasn’t animal, vegetable, or mineral, no newly discovered ocelot, okra, or obsidian requiring a name. It wasn’t a new product or invention, neither reaping machine nor revolver. It was nothing concrete in need of a label, neither lapdog or laptop. Nor was it an abstract political or philosophical concept like democracy or deconstruction. All right was already at hand to express the essential meaning of OK. In short, our language needed OK as much as a fish needs a bicycle, to use a famous comparison.
Before its invention, it would not have appeared on anyone’s list of needed words, the list that nowadays includes a term for “brothers and sisters” that isn’t as formal as siblings, and a gender-neutral personal pronoun to replace he or she. And yet, when created almost by happenstance, it caught on, better than most creations.
The Word That Shouldn’t Have Lived
As anyone who has tried it knows, inventing a word is no guarantee that anyone else will use it, let alone that it will be enshrined in dictionaries. And as anyone who has tried it knows, the more conspicuous an invented word, the less likely it is to be taken up into the vocabulary. And OK is, and was, conspicuous.
It’s not just that it began as a joke. True, our language has other initialisms like IOU and PDQ, not to mention more modern abbreviations like NIMBY and ROFL. But those are different; their spelling is OK. In contrast,
for most of its first seventy years or so, OK was well known to be a blatant misspelling of “all correct.”
It’s hard enough for a normal-looking word to gain acceptance into our vocabulary, but for such an oddity as OK, the odds would seem to be almost impossible. It doesn’t fit the mold of words we admit to the English language. In fact, it breaks the mold.
Words generally come into being by evolution, not special creation. Most new words come from old ones naturally developing new meanings or combining in new ways, rather than from conscious invention. Even experts at inventing new words usually fall flat. As examples of conscious and conspicuous coinage, who could forget humorist Gelett Burgess’s cowcat, meaning an insignificant person? Or futurist Faith Popcorn’s blanquilized, meaning a person “so loaded up with tranquilizers that they go through the day in a medicinal fog”? As is turns out, just about everyone has forgotten these artificial coinages, or never used them in the first place.
As a rule, oddities die out. Words conspicuous for their odd shape or for their cleverness rarely last longer than a round of chuckles. We may enjoy them, but we don’t adopt them into our vocabulary, just as we wouldn’t invite a circus menagerie into our home. And indeed, the numerous equally odd misspelled cousins of newborn OK, expressions like o.w. for all right, k.y. for no use, and n.s.m.g. for enough said among gentlemen, vanished as soon as the short-lived fad for abbreviations faded.
But OK had luck on its side. It managed not just to survive but to flourish in its infancy. And with that strong beginning, in less than a century it developed into America’s greatest invention.
Fertile Soil
OK certainly falls in the category of conspicuous coinage. Where conspicuousness usually dooms a neologism, this most conspicuous word made a virtue of its bizarreness and thrived because of its oddity rather than despite it.
So how did it survive?
Once it was launched, conditions had to be just right for the propagation of OK … but they were. OK was able to establish itself because of four unique circumstances in its early years:
1. The fad for joking abbreviations in Boston newspapers of the late 1830s
2. The campaign for reelection of a United States president who happened to come from Kinderhook, New York
3. Former President Andrew Jackson’s humble origins
4. The invention of the telegraph
The unlikely coincidence of these four circumstances created the perfect storm that allowed OK to flourish during the nineteenth century, both in practical use and as a marginalized slang term. It remained for the early twentieth century to rescue OK from the margin so that it could be used as widely as it is today. Perhaps the key impetus for that modern development was the almost universal amnesia about the true origins of OK that took place early in the twentieth century. With the source of OK forgotten, each ethnic group and tribe could claim the honor of having ushered it into being from an expression in their native language. With pride in OK thus replacing embarrassment about using it, OK settled into its current respectable maturity.
That’s how it is today. The next chapter tells how it began.
2
A SATURDAY MORNING IN BOSTON
ON SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 1839, A VISITOR TO BOSTON might have picked up a copy of that day’s Boston Morning Post and chanced upon this item in the second column on the second page, a report from Providence, Rhode Island:
Quite an excitement was caused here [in Providence] yesterday, by an announcement in the Boston Post, that a deputation from the Boston A. B. R. S. would pass through the city, on their way to N. York. Nothing but the short notice prevented the Marine Artillery from turning out to do honor to the occasion. The report proved unfounded, however, and has led to the opinion here that the Post is not the organ of that illustrious body.
Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, page 2
The above is from the Providence Journal, the editor of which is a little too quick on the trigger, on this occasion. We said not a word about our deputation passing “through the city” of Providence.—We said our brethren were going to New York in the Richmond, and they did go, as per Post of Thursday. The “Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells,” is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train- band, would have the “contribution box,” et ceteras, o. k. —all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.
What’s all that? Frankly, a visitor from out of town might be as perplexed as we are today about the A.B.R.S. and the Boston paper’s dispute with the Providence Journal. The visitor might well have stopped halfway through that item and moved on to the next:
Forgeries. —We learn that a large number of forgeries, amounting to several thousands of dollars, were detected yesterday at the banks in this town. The perpetrator, a young man of respectable connections, and who has hitherto sustained an irreproachable character, left here several days since, and was last seen in New York, on his way south.—N. Bedford Mercury.
And continuing down the column:
Hampden County.— The Hampden Post of the 20th instant says—
“The town elections in this county so far as we have received returns, have resulted favorably to the democratic cause. [The Morning Post was very favorable to the Democratic Party, and so, most likely, would have been its readers.] Granville and Monson, two federal towns last autumn, have, we understand elected democratic town officers this spring by very decided majorities. This is highly encouraging. Let other towns follow the example. Palmer and Westfield maintain their strong democratic majorities.”
And so on through other pro-Democratic reports to:
Mr. Brownson’s Discourse to-morrow morning, at the Masonic Temple, we are told will be on TRANSUBSTANTIATION.
On the First Page —Poetry—The Oratorio of David—The Wisdom and Genius of Shakespeare—The Irish Charitable Society’s Anniversary Celebration—Burning the President in effigy, & c.
If with that encouragement the visitor turned back to the first page, that reader would have missed the humble birth of what would later prove to be the greatest American expression of all time—o. k., coming at the end of the A.B.R.S. report quoted above. It’s buried in that complicated last sentence:
… perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train -band, would have the “contribution box,” et ceteras, o. k. —all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.
Even if it was not born in a stable, o. k. was anything but great in this first appearance. It appeared in lowercase letters, befitting its lowly employment as an attempt at humor (and also not abbreviating a proper noun). The joke that o. k. would be an abbreviation for all correct, when neither o nor k was the correct spelling, was such a stretch that it required the explanation “ o. k. —all correct” to follow immediately.
Only a faithful reader of the Morning Post would have been able to disentangle the complicated comments leading up to the attempt at humor of o. k. Fortunately, linguistic historian Allen Walker Read patiently read through many issues of the Morning Post and other newspapers of the time to provide an explanation for modern readers.
It seems that A.B.R.S. stands for “Anti-Bell-Ringing Society.” In the previous year, among other business, the Boston Common Council had issued an ordinance prohibiting the ringing of dinner bells. In response, in October 1838 a number of men jokingly formed the A.B.R.S., not to support the ordinance, as “Anti-Bell-Ringing” might suggest, but to oppose it. As soon as the A.B.R.S. was founded, the Morning Post began to chronicle its activities, summarizing its purpose in the issue of January 7, 1839, a few months before the birth of o. k.:
The main design of the founders of the Society was and is, to expose and oppose, by ridicule and otherwise, the spirit of ultraism in legislation, which is so prevailing a characteristic of the present time.
Among the officials of the A.B.R.S., as Read notes, were “Chief Butle
r and Imperturbable Deliberator,” “Confabulator, to do all the Society’s Unnecessary Talking,” and “Professor of Bell-ocution.” And so in that spirit, two days before the first appearance of o. k., the Boston Morning Post announced:
A.B.R.S.—We understand that a large deputation from this society will take passage in the John W. Richmond steamer for New York to-day, for the purpose of extending friendly congratulations with the auxiliary society in the Commercial Emporium. [In contrast, Boston was known as the Literary Emporium.]
That was the background for the appearance of o. k. in the report quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The Providence Daily Journal supposed that the A.B.R.S. would make an appearance in Providence, but as the Boston Morning Post noted in its response, “We said not a word about our deputation passing ‘through the city’ of Providence.” But the Post concludes its March 23 commentary by imagining the festivities that would occur if the A.B.R.S. made an appearance, “all correct.”
It was a typical issue of the Boston Morning Post for 1839, a single sheet folded to make four 16-by-26-inch pages of small print, beginning with advertising classified under headings like these:
BUSINESS CARDS.
BOOKS AND STATIONARY [ sic ].
AUCTION SALES.
DISEASED SPINES.
COMMERCIAL.
MARINE JOURNAL.
TREMONT THEATRE.
NATIONAL THEATRE.
The back page was filled with advertising for dry goods, railroads (complete with schedules), and medical remedies, such as
Dr. Gordak’s Jelly of Pomegranate and Peruvian Pills, highly recommended for Nervous Headache, Dizziness in the Head, Palpitation of the Heart, Oppression of the Breast, Dyspepsia, Flatulency, Costiveness, Darting pains in the Side, Back, and Limbs, most efficacious for Jaundice and Liver-complaint, most valuable for Blind and Bleeding Piles, for impurities of the Blood as Salt Rheum, Scrofula, Erysipelas, Tellers and Cancer, it is positively the best Medicine ever invented. It is also unrivalled in colds, coughs, and catarrh.
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