OK
Page 5
THE PEOPLE IS OLL KORRECT.
(The box is in the original.) And the 1891 history book concludes: “This was the origin of the use of the letters ‘O. K.,’ not uncommon in our own time.” It wasn’t the origin, but the denizens of Champaign County may be pardoned for not perusing the Boston newspapers of 1839.
Meanwhile, in Columbus, Ohio, the Straight-out Harrisonian offered this distinction in its issue of October 9, 1840:
The Whig definition of O.K. is—Oll Koming. Locofoco [Democratic] definition—Orful Katastrophe.
With pundits and politicians gleefully appropriating OK for their peculiar purposes, it began to spin out of control. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes the Lexington Intelligencer of October 9:
O.K. Perhaps no two letters have ever been made the initials of as many words as O.K.… When first used they were said to mean Out of Kash, (cash); more recently they have been made to stand for Oll Korrect, Oll Koming, Oll Konfirmed, &c. &c.
Exemplifying the Intelligencer’s claim, the Democratic New Era was happy to join in the imaginative interpretations of OK. On the eve of the election, the New Era printed a letter proposing nearly a dozen politically charged versions:
Mr. Editor—Everything that we see, hear, or discourse of, is O.K., any thing otherwise is out of my power to imagine, and from mature consideration, I have arrived at the following conclusions:
That Harrison, being the friend and advocate of Hard Cider, which (no doubt he freely uses) is O.K. “Olways Korned.”
That the “immortal Dan” [Webster] being Harrison’s adviser in all political matters, is O.K. because he is Harrison’s “own Konfidential.”
That “Henry [Clay] of the West” is likewise O.K. derived from no other source but his name “Old Klay.”
THAT MARTIN VAN BUREN, is O.K. because what he says is OLWAYS CREDITED, and what he does is OLL KORRECT.
…
That General Jackson is O.K. because he is “Olways Kandid.”
…
That the whigs engaged in committing the frauds on the Ballot Box in the fall of ’33, and spring of ’34, are O.K. because they are “Orful Konspirators.”
That Moses H. Grinnell, the president candidate for Congress, is O.K. because he is at present “Orfully Konfused.”
…
That my article is O.K. because it is Oll composed.
When the election of 1840 was over and Old Kinderhook had lost, Charles Gordon Greene of the Boston Morning Post, the daddy of OK, offered some ruefully humorous new interpretations for OK. In the issue of November 28:
O.K.—After the 4th of March next [with the inauguration of Whig President William Henry Harrison], these expressive initials will signify all kwarrelling. The whig house, divided against itself, cannot stand.
And on December 7:
Why shall we be O.K. after the first of January next? Because we shall be an Ousted Kernel [Greene himself was known as Colonel Greene].
Happy 1840, OK!
An exuberant writer, known only as C.B., summed up the situation of OK a year and a half after its birth in a poem that was published in the Boston Daily Times on December 15, 1840, and rediscovered by researcher Richard Walser in the 1960s. The poem refers to the presidential election where editor Greene was on the losing side, and to much else. There is no better way to show how widely by then OK had spread its fame and its meanings than to reprint it here in full. The particular political posturings matter less for our purpose than the inventive uses for OK.
The Log Cabin Advocate of December 15, 1840
Triumphant Pro-Harrison Newspaper Reporting Election Results
PHOTO BY HERITAGE AUCTION GALLERIES.
O.K.
What is’t that ails the people, Joe?
They’re in a kurious way,
For every where I chance to go,
There’s nothing but o.k.
They do not use the alphabet,
What e’er they wish to say,
And all the letters they forget,
Except the o. and k.
I’ve seen them on the Atlas’ page,
And also in the Post,
When both were boiling o’er with rage,
To see which fibbed the most.
The Major [editor of the Atlas] has kome off the best;
The Kernel [editor Greene] is surprised!
The one it seems meant oll korrect,
The other, oll kapsized!
Processions have been all the go,
And illuminations tall;
Hand bills were headed with k. o.,
Which means, they say, kome oll!
The way the people sallied out,
Was a kaution to the lazy;
And when o. k. I heard them shout,
I thought it meant oll krazy.
They say that Blair, the editor,
Is o. k. off to Kuba,
But what it is he’s gone there for,
Is nothing but false rumor.
K. k., the konkered kandidate,
Must yield to freedom’s right;
He’s a handsome man, but k. k. k.,
He kould not kome it kwite!
There’s Butler too, in whom, Whigs say,
No man kan safely trust;
They tell him oft to k. k. k.,
Keep karefully his krust.
The people thought when he took hold
To prove that votes were bought,
A monstrous fraud would kwick be told,
With Whigs, o. k., oll kaught!
The Merchants too have been o. k.,
Hard times have loudly said it;
It long has been too much their way,
To buy and sell on kredit.
They’ll now adopt as bad a kourse,
Be o. k., over cautious,
Which constantly will prove a source
Of miseries and tortures.
The President, that big steam ship,
Has acted very droll;
She was o. k. her second trip,
For she got out of koal.
K. k. k. is the proper name
For all the New York boats;
Kunard kan konquer on the main
Each steamer that it floats.
The would be swell, whose purse is drained,
Who kannot kut a dash:
To see o. k., his heart is pained,
Bekause he’s out of kash;
He e’en resolved to kut his throat,
But feels somewhat afraid,
He views o. k., his orful koat,
And Earle’s last bill unpaid.
Whene’er you read an accident,
’Tis o. k. that you see;
An orrible kalamity,—
Orful katastrophe.
And when the people rave and rant
About some trifling thing,
You’ll find it’s all o. k., oll kant,
Which makes the kountry ring.
They’re running k. k.’s in the street,
And handsomely they go;
I’ve heard them kalled konvenient Kabs,
By one who ought to know:—
He said he rode in one, one day,
When heavily it stormed,
And thought them just the thing for those
Who are o. k., oll korned [drunk].
The beauteous girls, unkonsciously,
Kause many sad regrets,
They love so well to be o. k.,
Such orrible 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.
To win this angel’s heart and hand,
I used o. k., oll kunning;
And thought to make my konverse grand,
By great attempts at punning.
’Twas all in vain,—she merely said
She liked me as a friend,
And now she’s gulling a young b
lade,
Whose love thus sad will end.
The kry of o. k. rends the air,
From north to south it goes,—
It’s on a shop in Brattle Square,
Where negroes sell old klothes!
The world ne’er saw such kurious times,
Since politics were born,—
You’ll see o. k. on grain-store signs,
Which stands for Oats and Korn!
This theme has on Pegasus’ way
Most wantonly obtruded,
And now, with joy, I have to say
It’s o. k. oll konkluded.
Yet four more lines I needs must write,
From which there’s no retreat,
O. k. again I must endite,
And—lo! it’s oll komplete!
Three days later, referring to a reprint of the poem in a weekly newspaper, the Times commented: “O.K. our readers will certainly admit is o.k.” Clearly, the core meaning of OK remained intact, but it was threatening to expand its periphery to encompass a large chunk of the language.
Against Expectations
By its very nature, OK had already violated the first rule for survival of a vocabulary creation: blend in, be inconspicuous. Conspicuous coinages can’t compete. Clever comments aren’t incorporated. Jokes don’t blend into the common vocabulary.
The evidence for this principle is overwhelming (and given at length in my 2002 book Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success). For just one example: In the 1980s Rich Hall published five books of sniglets, “words that don’t appear in the dictionary but should,” such as mustgo, “any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so long it has become a science project.” Of all his invented words, the only one that ever caught on was sniglets itself. The others were too clever, too conspicuous.
And OK was conspicuous. It kalled attention to itself by its misspelling, by its use of the konspikuous K (katching, isn’t it?), and by its origin as a joke, which in turn inspired other jokes. Indeed, OK called ekstreme attention to itself. It’s hard to imagine any other koinage of American English evoking a 112-line poem.
End of the Road?
Paradoxically, as 1840 drew to a close, the very prominence of OK put it in danger of demise. With so conspicuous an appearance, and such possibilities for dispersion of meaning, OK was on the verge of vanishing into thin air, leaving behind only its smile, a chuckle to be known only to historians of early nineteenth-century American politics. Instead, it was saved by yet another joke, the subject of the next chapter.
4
HOAX ANDREW JACKSON’S MISSPELLING
THANKS TO JOKESTERS AND POLITICIANS, OK WAS RIDING HIGH a year after its birth. But its rise was in danger of being meteoric, a mere flash in the pan, because konspikuous klever koinages rarely make it into the everyday vocabulary of a language. We laugh at them or with them, we play with them, and then we set them aside when we return to everyday discourse.
Indeed, having gone through the wringer in the election of 1840, OK was too conspicuous, too much of a joke, and too multifarious in its range of meanings to slip under the tent of the permanent general vocabulary. By the end of that year it had sprouted so many joking meanings that it was on the verge of evaporating into meaninglessness. A miracle would be needed to save it from being a mere footnote to the history of Boston newspaperdom or early nineteenth-century American politics. But a miracle did appear, and in a most unlikely form.
No, the miracle wasn’t a sober essay on the practical uses of OK. Nor was it a plea for open-mindedness and respect for others, expressed as “I’m OK, you’re OK”; that interpretation wouldn’t be invented until well over a century later. Instead, it was a political hoax, meant as a satirical joke but taken seriously by both sides in that 1840 presidential election. Once the hoax was successfully launched, the place of OK in our language was secure.
Andrew Jackson’s Orthography
To understand the OK hoax of 1840, it is necessary to go back more than a decade to the election of 1828, which brought Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren’s Democratic predecessor, to the White House. Jackson’s immense popularity in turn propelled Van Buren into his own first presidency, in 1836, and Van Buren was still being extolled as Old Hickory’s candidate in the 1840 election. During that election an opponent of Van Buren wrote a bogus story mocking Jackson that eventually made OK a household word.
Jackson was known for his humble origins, in pointed contrast to the aristocratic background of his six predecessors as president of the United States. Jackson’s partisans in the elections of 1824 (when he lost to aristocratic John Quincy Adams), 1828 (when he won), and 1832 (when he won again) turned previous presidential qualifications on their head and boasted that he was a man of the common people. Why, Jackson was even born in a log cabin.
Indeed, the log cabin became such a potent political symbol that for the rest of the nineteenth century presidential candidates associated themselves with log cabins if they could. Notable in the case of the election of 1840, which did so much for OK, was the reinvention of aristocratic William Henry Harrison as a man of “log cabin and hard cider.”
But getting back to Jackson: While a majority of his fellow citizens admired his rise from humble beginnings, others questioned whether a person so apparently lacking in education should be allowed to hold the office of president.
In fact, Jackson’s education was not as lacking as might appear. He attended school for several years, his mother intending him for the ministry. That didn’t work; she died when he was fourteen, and his temperament and hot temper were manifestly unsuited to a clerical career. Nevertheless, he was educated enough to spend two years as a schoolteacher, followed by three years reading law with two eminent lawyers, the usual way of preparing for a legal career before the days of law schools. He obtained his law license in 1787, at age twenty, and went on to be a district attorney, a county judge, and a judge of the Tennessee Superior Court. By the time he was elected president in 1828, he had also served as a U.S. senator. He was skilled in the use of language.
Nevertheless, his opponents assumed that anyone with so poor a background (and perhaps also with such a rough temperament) must be illiterate—or at least a bad speller. And so in Jackson’s successful presidential campaign of 1828, as documented by Allen Walker Read, his ability to spell was impugned first by one hostile newspaper and then another, often in satire and sarcasm.
The first attack came in a Washington newspaper in February 1828. It was a hoax, though not the one that later would give OK new life. The paper printed this letter, purportedly from Jackson himself:
TO THE EDITORS OF THE WASHINGTON JOURNAL.
When the midnight assasins plunges his dagger to the heart & riffles your goods, the turpitude of this scene looses all its horrors when compared with the act of the secrete assasins poniard leveled against femal character by the hired minions of power.
If you could believe its authenticity—and probably only the blindest anti-Jacksonians actually did—it was a shocking revelation of the cacography, not to mention lunacy, of Andrew Jackson.
The battle was joined. Misspellings are a tempting topic for print publications, offering easy targets for denunciation and ridicule, so both sides in the 1828 election embraced the opportunity. Other newspapers joined in, reprinting the Journal letter and arguing, for example, in this blast from the New York American : “Now, we think it rather hard that in a country whose proud and just boast it is that common school education is more universally diffused than in any other, the candidate for chief magistracy should be deficient even in the elements of orthography and grammar.”
Jackson’s partisans dismissed the Washington Journal letter as fake, especially after a pro-Jackson delegation visited the editor of the Journal and asked him to produce the original. He couldn’t. All he could show them was a printed pamphlet purportedly reproducing the handwriting of the letter. According to the pro-Jackson United States Telegraph of the
capital city:
The Editor of [the Journal ], Mr. Force, was then told by those gentlemen that they did not believe the manuscript was the hand writing of General Jackson; and one of them added, he thought he could conveniently find a dozen persons, at least, who could imitate Gen. Jackson’s hand writing equally as well as the person who had attempted an imitation of it.…
Hundreds of persons in society, have sufficient materials, from which, to refute such a pitiful and contemptible slander: but these disciples of the professor of rhetoric [John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s opponent], are almost deranged from a fear that the people are about to furnish themselves with a President, who sprung from a common family, who has not been educated at Foreign Courts.
The argument continued throughout that election year of 1828, with each side presenting letters more or less authentic in support of their view of Jackson’s orthography. For example, a Jackson partisan wrote in the New York Enquirer:
To say that the hero of New-Orleans, the Governor of a Territory, a Judge in his own State, a man who has enjoyed the confidence of every republican administration in this country—to say that such a man cannot spell the commonest word, and to say it seriously too, is too much for poor human nature to bear.