OK

by Metcalf, Allan;

  The practice must have been a little tongue in cheek at first, for anyone charged with approving a document would be enough of an orthographer to know that O and K were the wrong initials. Maybe he wrote OK in good humor. But perhaps he also noticed that the letters O and K make a more satisfying and distinctive mark than, say, A and C. O is a satisfying oval, all curves; K is all straight lines, a collection of sticks. The combination is stark and striking. OK was fortunate in its alphabetic heredity.

  In contrast with the detailed evidence for OK as a joke and OK in politics in 1839 and 1840, there is a scarcity of information about the earliest actual users of the OK mark on documents. But in 1864, nearly a quarter century after the Jackson OK story saw print, there is a passing reference to the practice of marking OK on documents in an odd poem about Abraham Lincoln. It is yet another attempt at humor, so it needs to be taken with more than a grain of salt; and it purports to come from Liverpool, England, which distances it. But it is in an American magazine, The Old Guard, A Monthly Journal; Dedicated to the Principles of 1776 and 1787. Published in New York City from 1863 to 1867, The Old Guard was virulently proslavery, antiwar, and anti-Lincoln.

  The poem, headed “Liverpool—September, 1864,” is titled “Abraham’s Vision—an Homeric Ode.” The synopsis at the beginning explains: “In the following Ode, Abe is supposed to have fallen asleep after dinner. He dreamt he was shown the Future of his Country. The South had gained its Independence. Then, following on this, he sees the fate of his associates in government. Abe is spoken of as if he were really present.”

  Abe prays for a vision of the future, and Apollyon, a hellish visitor, obliges him with the postwar result: “Two countries with a President and flag for each.” At that,

  Abraham, poor soul, was stricken dumb with fright,

  At the sad end of this his wished-for sight;

  His “lingual ribbon” once more moving free:

  “Guess, stranger, that view ain’t O. K.”† said he;

  “Reckon my country, sir, shall have a better fate;

  You’ll see U-nited States again, I calculate.”

  To whom Apollyon: “Sire, ’twas you express’d

  The wish to look; I see you’re much distressed;

  If still you wish your rulers’ fates to see,

  Then, summon courage, sire, and follow me.”

  And Lincoln is led to the underworld, to see the unhappy shades of Horace Greeley and the like. The dagger after O. K. links to a footnote that reads:

  † O.K.—Anglice (Oil Kirrect,) all correct. First used by President Taylor in signing official documents during the Mexican War.

  Humorous exaggeration is evident in the hyperelevated language of “lingual ribbon,” the hyperlearned Latin “Anglice” for “in English,” and the hypermisspelling of “Oil Kirrect,” going beyond even the joking misspellings of 1839 and 1840. So we should not take for certain that Lincoln used OK or that President Zachary Taylor marked documents with OK. For that matter, Taylor wasn’t president during the Mexican War; he wasn’t elected until 1848, just after the war had come to a close. The “facts” of the poem indeed need to be taken with a grain of salt.

  Yet there could be a germ of truth in the footnote to the poem. The Mexican War took place from 1846 to 1848, some years after the birth of OK and its attribution to Jackson, so it might have been in genuine use for documents then. And Taylor, then just General Taylor, was the most prominent military commander throughout the war, hero of the battles of Palo Alto in 1846 and of Buena Vista in 1847. Undoubtedly he had many occasions to send official reports back to President Polk in Washington. Though Taylor came from a prominent Virginia family, he had spent his childhood in a log cabin on the frontier and was known as “Old Rough and Ready,” a man of the people in the Jacksonian mold. For what it’s worth, he had a deserved reputation as a bad speller. Either in all seriousness or in conscious good humor, he may have marked OK on documents.

  Old Jacob Astor

  In 1881 a London author credited yet another American with the origin of the OK mark, none other than

  old Jacob Astor, the millionaire of New York. He was looked upon in commercial circles as a man of great information and sound judgment, and was a sort of general referee as to the solvency or standing of other traders. If a note of enquiry as to any particular trader’s position came, the answer to which he intended to be satisfactory, he was accustomed to write across the note the letters “O.K.,” and return it to the writer. The letters O.K. he supposed to be the initials of “all correct,” and in this sense they are now universally current in the States.

  Astor died in 1848, so it is possible that he, as well as Taylor, used O.K. in the 1840s. But whether or not they did, these stories are evidence that the practice of writing OK on documents was well known a few decades after its first telling. And the transposition from Jackson to Lincoln and Taylor and Astor shows that what made the greatest impression was not who supposedly did it but what they did.

  The Professor’s OK Mark

  At last in 1871 there is confirming evidence that people were actually marking OK on documents to attest that they passed muster, and that this practice had been going on for some time. Strangely enough, it is yet another humorous item, but this time the joke is not about OK. It comes from academia, an item in the Hamilton [College] Literary Monthly for January 1871:

  A Freshman at Cornell was recently horrified to find that he had handed his physiology notes to his professor in French, for examination and criticism. But what was his relief to receive his notes from said professor with the well known mark O.K., applied.

  And so at the very latest by 1871, thirty years after it saw the light of day, OK had acquired its completely serious function as a mark of approval, all thanks to a joke.

  Beyond a doubt, Bennett’s story about Jackson’s OK was a hoax. But also beyond a doubt, without that story, OK as we know it today would not exist. Indeed, chances are that OK would not exist at all except as a historical footnote. If Bennett had not published his article, the history of OK likely would have come to an inglorious end not long after the election of 1840.

  5

  AESTHETICS THE LOOK AND SOUND OF OK

  IF A HUMOROUS ABBREVIATION MEANING “ALL RIGHT” WAS GOING to enter our American vocabulary, why wouldn’t it be OW? That joke, the mock abbreviation for “oll wright,” was already in circulation in the Boston press a year before OK came along. “All right” was, and is, a more familiar expression than “all correct.” So why did OW fade and OK succeed?

  As we have seen, it was partly a matter of politics. As luck would have it, Martin Van Buren came from Kinderhook, New York, not Watervliet. But the rise of OK was also helped by its look and sound.

  A circle with an asterisk. Smooth oval, cluster of sticks. Feminine O, masculine K. That’s the look of OK.

  In print, on paper, or on the computer screen, in capital letters or lowercase, OK commands attention for joining extremes: of all the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, ultimate roundness and ultimate angularity.

  That striking contrast gives it special effectiveness as a mark on papers or in headlines and is probably a reason why it was quickly put to use for both, even in the knowledge that OK was not the correct spelling for all correct. OW shows almost as much contrast, but W doesn’t explode from its nucleus the way K does.

  The correctly spelled abbreviation for OK also fares worse. AC does have angularity next to roundness, but the angles are more diffuse and the roundness is less complete. And while OK retains its contrast in lowercase ok, the A becomes curvy in lowercase, and the contrast round-angular is completely lost.

  No other combination of letters, capital or lowercase, shows the contrast of OK. Even the same letters when reversed show less contrast, because the K in OK looks away from O; in KO it looks toward it.

  Surely the look of the OK combination was not in Charles Gordon Greene’s mind when he launched OK (as o. k.) on March 23, 1839. But ju
st as surely, that striking combination was an attraction, even if subconscious, for the politicians who picked up OK in 1840 and the scribes who (perhaps jokingly at first) began writing OK on documents, supposedly in imitation of Andrew Jackson.

  Its striking look was also emphasized because of K, the most striking letter of the English alphabet. K is pekuliar bekause it kan be substituted for C and still konvey with klarity the meaning and pronunciation of a word. In fact, it is less ambiguous in pronunciation than the C it replaces.

  For a long time, K was a rarity in the English alphabet, the K sound largely represented by the letter C. But when I and E after C made the C sound like S, as in cinder and certain, K gradually came to be used to make clear that king and keep were pronounced with the K sound. There aren’t too many such words, amounting to only a dozen pages of a thousand-page dictionary. So in English, K remains scarce.

  Put a K where it is not needed, therefore, and it klowns around, katching attention but not kausing konfusion. Real-life examples of this are plentiful. Indeed, there was a “kraze for K “around the time of OK’s birth, manifested in attempts at humor like this one from a Chicago newspaper in April 1839:

  The Eight K’s. The Hon. Henry Clay was denominated the Eight K’s, by a coterie of wags in Washington, during the last session of Congress. He acquired this title thus: a gentleman sitting in the gallery of the Senate chamber during an interesting debate, wished to point out Mr. Clay to his friend, a foreigner, who sat beside him, without disturbing the house, and wrote upon a card for him, thus:—“The gentleman to the left of the speaker, in klaret kolored koat with krimson kollar, is Mr. Klay, member of Kongress from Kentucky.”

  Kodak is a famous example of a nineteenth-century company that chose K to make its name memorable. The first talking movie featuring Mickey Mouse was The Karnival Kid in 1929.

  In the twenty-first century, newspaper writers no longer indulge in spelling games with K, but its conspicuousness continues to be put to use in products like Kleenex, Kandy Korn hybrid sweet corn, and local businesses like the Kottage Kafe, Klassic Kar Detailers, and the Kute Kurl Beauty Salon.

  The clownishness associated with the konspicuous K, however, deters its widespread use. So, for example, you can find a Kolorado Karaoke and Mobile DJ (the first K probably influenced by the spelling of the second word) and Kolorado Paint Kmpny, in Fort Collins, with one employee, but almost all of the thousands of Colorado businesses choose to spell Colorado with a C.

  The sounds of OK were clearly secondary to its appearance in print, but they too are fortuitously clear and simple: two long vowels, O and A, separated in the middle by a quick K. Nearly every language in the world not only has these three sounds but allows them to be combined in that sequence, which accounts both for the spread of OK throughout the world and the penchant for discovering the “true” origin of OK in words or expressions of another language that sound very much like OK. Without its particular look and sound, OK might never have made it out of Boston.

  6

  FALSE ORIGINS

  BEFORE PROCEEDING FURTHER, IT’S IMPORTANT TO CLEAR THE air about the origin of OK. Thanks to the published work of Allen Walker Read, who documented the emergence and spread of OK in 1839 and 1840 with literally hundreds of contemporary citations, it is absolutely clear that OK began as a joke in a Boston newspaper and was transformed by politics and a hoax into the expression we still use today. The trail of written evidence from that day to the present is thick and clear. No other origin is plausible. Yet throughout the history of OK there have been doubts. If it weren’t for the overwhelming evidence, the true history of OK would indeed be hard to believe.

  If you want to know only the facts about OK, you can skip this chapter. It is filled with untruths. They are untruths, however, that show the vitality of OK and the desire to bless it with a better beginning.

  Say It Ain’t So

  “Personally I have a terrible time believing that a localized comical abbreviation fad invented the most familiar word in the world and did so without popularizing a single other abbreviation,” says a discussant on the Wikipedia entry for OK. Indeed, it’s almost an insult to our collective intelligence. We want nobler origins. No wonder so many other candidates have been proposed.

  The first red herring was attribution of the initials OK to Andrew Jackson’s misspelling of “all correct”—accurate in its interpretation of the abbreviation, but egregiously wrong about the inventor. As we have seen, that deliberate fiction was concocted when OK was barely a year old, in 1840. It was still a widely accepted explanation in October 1866, when journalist George Wakeman published an article on “Live Metaphors” in The Galaxy: An Illustrated Magazine of Entertaining Reading of New York City.

  But even this [“All serene!” his proposal for the call a night watchman should make] was neither as concise nor as satisfactory as the simple letters “O. K.” All that anybody desired to know about anything that interested him was simply that it was “O. K.” … They were a watchword of Tammany, were afterward used by the Whigs, and then became common property. They are supposed to mean “Oll Korrect,” and the story is that General Andrew Jackson, who had more spirit than spelling, used to note this “O. K.,” supposed by him the proper initials for the words, on the back of any paper which he found “all correct.” But who knows whether this was not the sly contrivance of some polished Whig?

  The Revolutionary OK

  Wakeman was on the mark in doubting the Jackson origin of OK. Having suspected one source, however, he holds the honor of promoting another even more dubious:

  Some one has discovered an order-of-the-day of the old Revolutionary army, dated 6th September, 1780, in which the countersign is “O. K.,” showing, if the order is genuine, that the letters were in use at that time.

  Here is the “some one,” from the New-York Commercial Advertiser of December 6, 1841:

  O.K.

  We have at length struck upon the origin of these mystical letters—stolen last year by the wicked Whigs, as their watchwords, from the sagamores of Tammany Hall. It will be seen from the heading of the following order that these letters formed the countersign of the guards on the 6th of September, 1780.

  “HEAD Quarters, 6th Sept. 1780.

  “Parole, RICHMOND. Counter-signs, {O.

  {K.

  Watch-word—FABIUS.

  “For the Day, Brigadier Patterson,

  “Col. H. Jackson,

  “Col. Badlaw,

  “Brigade Major Nicholas Fish.”

  A document from half a century earlier! That would surely have pride of place, upstaging the Boston joke of 1839. Except—

  Even if this document is authentic, it hardly qualifies as a possible origin of the OK we know from fifty years later. For one thing, countersigns, as well as paroles and watchwords, are arbitrary and change daily. They are meant to be unknown to the enemy, so that might be an incentive to avoid a common phrase. For another, the O and K are listed on separate lines rather than next to each other. Finally, and most important, there is no subsequent chain of OKs leading from this instance to the widespread use of OK in 1839 and 1840. Even if someone took this isolated O.K. to mean “all correct,” it subsequently vanished without a trace. The OK that appeared half a century later has no connection with these countersigns.

  Young Andrew Jackson

  It’s not surprising, then, that little has been made of the O.K. countersigns of 1780. That was not true of a 1790 document published in an 1859 History of Middle Tennessee by one Albigence Waldo Putnam. Because of its documentary status and its connection with Andrew Jackson, it persuaded scholars for nearly a century to accept the false Jacksonian origin of OK. Twenty years after the emergence of OK in Boston, Putnam wrote:

  When General Jackson became candidate for President, it was published to the world that he spelled all correct “Oll Korrect,” and the O.K. are familiar to everybody.

  We were startled to read the following record:

&n
bsp; “Wednesday, 6th Oct., 1790: Court met according to adjournment. Andrew Jackson, Esq., proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker for a negro man, which was O.K.” These are the exact capital letters. We find another instance of this abbreviation, and two where the letters seem to be O.R.

  Once again, there was no intermediate instance leading from these documents to the Boston newspaper of 1839, but the connection to Jackson made them hard to ignore. Finally, nearly a century later, researcher Woodford Heflin took a look at the originals. On close examination, it is evident that the letters on all of those documents actually are O.R., meaning “ordered recorded,” not O.K. The capital letter that Putnam took for K is simply an R with a flourish. Careful scrutiny of the document in question showed that it actually reads, “Andrew Jackson, Esqr. proved a bill of Sale from Hugh McGary to Kasper Mansker for a negro man which is O.R.” Heflin published a photograph of the document in the journal American Speech in 1941, to convince anyone who might doubt the correct interpretation.

  So the search for OK in documents prior to 1839 has been fruitless, even with intense interest by scholars and now the vast new resources of searchable old books and periodicals available on the Internet. It is frankly doubtful that any credible antedatings of OK ever will be found, because if OK had been invented before 1839, we would expect not just an isolated instance but a succession of instances leading up to that year.

  The lack of documentation hasn’t deterred speculation, however, and speculation has often become belief. After all, the thinking goes, surely this greatest of Americanisms, known and used worldwide, must have had a more distinguished and logical origin than a joke in a newspaper.