OK

by Metcalf, Allan;

  OK Chevrolet

  In the right context, however, even in the twentieth century OK could find a commercial use. Chevrolet succeeded for a time by linking OK specifically to the OK mark used on documents. In the mid twentieth century, Chevrolet dealers literally tagged their used cars with OK. It was an apt choice. To claim that a new car was OK would hardly interest buyers, but the customer’s number one concern about a used car was “Is it OK?”

  Chevrolet dealers put on their used cars a red tag declaring “This is an OK USED CAR,” featuring OK in large bright red lowercase script, with a narrow blue shadow, on a yellow background surrounded by a blue circle. Dealers displayed a large sign with that OK design, and it appeared frequently in magazine advertisements. “Buy a used car with this tag … and buy with NEW CAR confidence!” reads an ad from 1954. “Look for this tag and get a used car you can believe in,” reads another.

  A full-page 1965 magazine ad, illustrated with the OK sign, reads:

  “We go out of our way to welcome you when you’re looking for your first used car.

  We’re Chevy dealers.”

  You wouldn’t be surprised to hear this at your Chevrolet dealer’s.

  At a Chevy dealer’s, you get the treatment he hopes brings you back next time you’re looking for a used car. Or even a new car.

  He’ll also welcome you with many different late-model trade-ins. As well as experienced used car salesmen who actually wait on you, once you’ve looked the cars over.

  And because Chevrolet dealers go out of their way for you, you don’t have to go out of your way for them. You’ll find at least one—complete with after-the-sale service facilities—right in your neighborhood.…

  Chevrolet was the economy division of General Motors, below Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac, so it is no accident that it was Chevrolet that advertised the even greater economy of buying a used car. It was … OK.

  Chevrolet long ago retired the OK tag, but there are present-day used car dealers who use memories of the Chevrolet campaign to advantage, including OK Used Cars of St. Louis, established 1992, which advertises: “Offering late model vehicles that are serviced and safety checked before they are offered for sale. We offer on or off site vehicle inspections with the service facility of your choice.” The logo of OK Used Cars includes the red script ok on a yellow background in a blue circle just like Chevrolet’s.

  Why would OK work for used cars but not, say, wedding receptions? Well, a buyer’s concern about a used car is that it’s OK, that it doesn’t have serious problems. Adjectives like wonderful and great for a used car raise suspicions. For a used car, OK seems a more honest claim. A wedding reception, on the other hand, had better be better than OK.

  Not So OK Soda

  The peril of using OK in a product name, even as a joke, was demonstrated by the Coca-Cola company in the mid-1990s when it test-marketed a product known as OK Soda. The company’s marketing department supposedly determined that OK was the best-known expression among all the world’s languages, and Coke was second best. They even go together: OK is Coke’s middle name (or letters). It’s possible that the worldwide success of Coke, like that of OK, involved the distinctive letters O and K and their sounds. But recognition does not necessarily mean enthusiasm.

  And that information turned out to be irrelevant, anyhow. The company decided to name its product OK Soda, not OK Coke, and it was tested not all over the world but just in various locations in the United States.

  The company and its ad agency were aware that OK wouldn’t add zest to the drink. Curiously, that seemed to be the point. OK Soda, made of cola enhanced with fruit flavors, was designed to appeal to teenagers, especially boys. And teenagers, the thinking went, were too cynical for ordinary advertising pitches. So the quirky advertising for OK Soda went so far as to disparage the product, with declarations like “Never overestimate the remarkable abilities of OK brand soda.” An “OK Manifesto” included other lukewarm sayings:

  What’s the point of OK? Well, what’s the point of anything?

  The better you understand something, the more OK it turns out to be.

  OK Soda does not subscribe to any religion, or endorse any political party, or do anything other than feel OK.

  There is no real secret to feeling OK.

  Please wake up every morning knowing that things are going to be OK.

  Some of these lines were allusions to the “I’m OK, you’re OK” psychology of two decades earlier, but that did not negate the lukewarm connotation of OK, and the allusions were elusive anyhow.

  Coca-Cola even tried to get its term OK-ness added to the dictionary, with this definition: “An optimistic feeling that in spite of the complications of day-to-day life, things always work themselves out.” But you can’t change the meaning of a word by fiat, even the fiat of the world’s largest soft drink company. OK was satisfactory, no question, but not intrinsically optimistic or encouraging. “Think OK, drink OK” was another of OK Soda’s slogans. Not exactly electrifying.

  OK Today

  OK permeates our documentation and conversation, our personal and business lives—and yet it remains practically nonexistent in the names of products and rare in the names of businesses. OK affirms, but without the enthusiasm that a product or business would want.

  A search for present-day OK businesses, therefore, even with the vacuuming power of Google, turns up little. One category with a few OKs is the barbershop. There is OK Barber in downtown Grants Pass, Oregon, with the oldest barber in the state. There are OK Barber Shops in Rochester, New York, and Rochester, Minnesota, as well as Millbrooks, Alabama, among many others. Of the OK Barber Shop in Red Bluff, California, a reviewer says,

  This is the normal old time 1950s barber shop. It is not for people wanting a salon style haircut or something that is more modern in terms of styling. It is a place for an older gentleman who still wears his Marine Corp style haircut. I have found that in general they cut hair much too short. Their perception of short is different than other places that I have used to get a haircut. If that is the kind of haircut you want, than this is a place you can go to.

  For some men, a haircut just needs to be OK. You can get an old-fashioned haircut of that kind at an OK barber.

  A barbershop can be OK and even advertise itself as such, but there are no OK Stylists and only one OK Salon, in Long Beach, California. It too seems old-fashioned, according to reviewer Judy K.:

  Need a good haircut. Don’t have much money or want to waste a lot of time having it done then go to O K Salon. It’s a very small place at the edge of the shopping center next to Yum Yum Donuts. Don’t expect coffee and glamour here but you will get a good cut from any of the stylists. I can’t speak about coloring, perms, manicures or other services because I’ve only had my haircut here.

  With this one exception, you’d have to go as far as Chandigarh, India, to find an OK Salon and Academy.

  A few beauty salons, to be sure, take the name OK. There are OK Beauty Salons in New Llano, Louisiana, and in Longmont, Colorado, where you can get wedding dresses and bridal gowns; the Han OK Beauty Salon in Flushing, New York; OK Beauty Salon & Boutique in Cheyenne, Wyoming; the Korean-American OK Beauty Salon in Anchorage, Alaska (cross listed under Adult Entertainment, for some reason); and the OK Beauty Salon in Anaheim, California, where Bao Trang Nguyen and Lucie Nguyen are the operators, Quang Knguyen is a manicurist, and Tuyet Mai T Vu is a cosmetologist. What most of these have in common is a language other than English spoken by their proprietors. In other languages, the American import OK has a more exotic connotation than in American English. Then too, OK is as American an expression as you can find, so OK may be as much a gesture of Americanism as displaying a flag.

  You can find an OK Bakery in Centreville, Virginia, and in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. To judge by reviewers’ comments about the latter, the inadvertent implication of mediocrity is apt:

  Am not sure why any establishment would willingly
brand itself as mediocre, but I will write this off as being lost-in-translation. Then again, this is your standard Chinese Bakery quality: no more, no less.

  This place lives up to its name, its just Ok.

  Decent breads, coffee, once had a taro bubble tea which was not that bad.

  They have some cakes which arent very good lol as well as some dim sum and noodles in the back.

  The one exception to the scarcity of OK companies is dry cleaners. For some reason there are hundreds of OK Cleaners throughout the country. Maybe it’s because all we ask from cleaners is that they return our clothes in OK condition, no worse than they were before. Maybe it’s because too many cleaners turn out not to be OK, and customers need reassurance that their cleaner is OK. Maybe it’s because some cleaners are operated by people who experience the excitement of OK in languages other than English. In any case, OK Cleaners are found in places ranging from El Monte, California, to Naperville, Illinois, Lithia Springs, Georgia, and Collegeville, Pennsylvania. There is OK Cleaners and Alterations in Lakewood, Washington, and OK Cleaners and Shoe Service is in Hudson, Ohio.

  8 O.K. Clubs

  WHILE OK WAS WORKING ON THE RAILROAD, OVER THE TELE- graph lines, on documents, and even occasionally in the names of companies and products, it wasn’t forgotten in one of its important original uses. The political OK Clubs of 1840 were not revived for later presidential elections, but the idea of labeling a club OK caught on. Well into the turn of the twentieth century, OK Clubs flourished throughout the nation.

  After OK had been adopted as the name of a club by the Tammany boys in the presidential election of 1840, others happily followed suit. This might have been because OK was instantly recognizable yet satisfyingly mysterious. It had connotations of success—after all, by midcentury OK was used to approve documents and confirm arrangements by telegraph—but also of fun, considering the absurdity of the well-known misspelling of “all correct,” and even of mystery, considering the many possible joking interpretations OK could evoke.

  During the Civil War there were OK Boys, at least in North Carolina. An 1867 narrative of the Civil War by Augustus Woodbury says of the Confederate forces on Roanoke:

  There were infantry and artillery on the island. There were the “Overland Greys,” “Yankee Killers,” “Sons of Liberty,” “Jackson Avengers,” “O. K. Boys,” from North Carolina, and some, with a more respectable name, from Virginia.

  To Woodbury, apparently, OK lacked a little in respectability.

  New York City remained a center of OK Club activity. Consider this description of a parade there on the eve of the 1888 presidential election, a dispatch published in the November 5 Fort Worth Daily Gazette :

  NEW YORK’S LATEST RALLY.

  New York, Nov. 4—The Democratic paraders last night were fantastically decorated and bedecked with flags and bandanas in every conceivable way. They moved along twelve abreast, but were frequently blocked by the crushing crowd whom it seemed the police were powerless to handle. Everywhere could be heard the question: “What’s the matter with Grover?” [Cleveland, the Democratic candidate for president] and regularly came the answer “He’s all right.” …

  Then came the Commercial “O K” Club, the glass trade men, the wholesale dry goods porters and truckmen, retail dry goods clerks, the Stock Exchange Club, auxilliary club of the same, Consolidated Stock Exchange, Summer Guards, Railroad Club, West Side Business Men’s Club, wholesale jewelers, insurance men, custom house brokers, photographers, wholesale druggists, hide and leather, boot and shoe men, Young Men’s Independent Club and the Elevated Railroad employees.

  On March 29, 1900, an OK Club made front-page news in the New-York Tribune for a different reason:

  MAN’S BODY FOUND IN THE BAY.

  BELIEVED TO BE THAT OF CAPTAIN CHARLES BARRY

  The body of a drowned man was found yesterday in New-York Bay. A letter addressed to T. S. Shortland, No. 110 Wall-st., New-York, was found on him. There was also a receipt from the O. K. Club for $1 dues. T. S. Shortland, of the Shortland Brothers’ Transportation Company, 110 Wall-st., when asked as to the letter, said that he thought it probable the body was that of Captain Charles Barry, a former employee of the company. “He has not been in our employ since January,” he added, “but I understand he has been missing for some time. The fact that he had the card of the O. K. Club proves him to have been an employee of this firm, for that is the name of a benevolent organization our men have.”

  OK Clubs weren’t confined to New York, however, but flourished far and wide. Baltimore, for example, had a “juvenile literary society” called the O.K. Club, whose letter of praise for Appletons’ Journal appeared in an 1871 issue of that publication. After quoting the club’s endorsement (“We consider it the best family paper now published in this country”), the editors comment: “These are obviously very judicious views, and we cordially congratulate the young gentlemen of the O. K. Club on their good taste and sound judgment. They are certainly O. K. about the JOURNAL.”

  And there were many other clubs. Page 10 of the St. Paul Daily Globe for September 16, 1888, carried this announcement: “The O. K. club will give a dance at Thomas hall Saturday evening, Sept. 22.” The Sacramento Record-Union of May 5, 1891, reported on page 3 that “The D. C. O. K. club will give a dance at Liberty Gardens, Highland Park, on Thursday evening.” (No explanation for D. C., but the O. K. part of the club name has to bring OK to mind.)

  In the Richmond (Va.) Times for May 26, 1901, on page 5 we read: “The O. K. Club will give a picnic on to-morrow at Portiwiag Farm. The wagons will leave 622 Louisiana at 9 A.M.” And in Falls City, Nebraska, the Tribune announced on January 17, 1908, page 4: “The O. K. club gave a party Tuesday night at the home of Ed Davis and wife. Games were played and enjoyable evening passed by the young people. Oysters were served.”

  The Harvard OK

  OK even went to college. The taint of Tammany did not deter OK from entering the arena of high culture at the nation’s oldest institution of higher education, Harvard College.

  On September 27, 1858, nearly two decades after the invention of OK, fifteen members of the Harvard Class of 1859 founded a literary society with the name OK. Formed in opposition to the Greek fraternity system at Harvard, the OK took as its quite serious aim the promotion of elocution and literature. The OK met every two weeks that academic year. According to research by Christian J. W. Kloesel, published a century later in the New England Quarterly,

  During regular meetings a paper on the exercises of the previous meeting was presented by an appointed editor; six appointed declaimers offered their appraisals and introduced new matters of literary interest; and the remaining members joined in declamations and other exercises.

  Since the members were graduating seniors, the Harvard OK would have expired with their graduation in 1859, but that spring they adopted a new constitution admitting four members from the junior class in addition to the seniors, thus ensuring continuation of the OK.

  An example of the high standards of the OK appears in a memorial biography of one Francis Custis Hopkinson, published in 1866:

  He was strong in debate, taking front rank in the “Institute”; and his manly oratory always won for him admiration in the “O.K.”

  The Harvard OK continued until the midst of World War I in 1916 or 1917, with ups and downs both in membership and in seriousness of purpose. In the 1870s, for example, Edward S. Martin later recalled:

  The O. K. was the literary Society. At it we read papers and consumed beer and little cakes cut in the form of O and K.

  But for most of its lifetime the OK remained focused on literary declamations and exercises. And its members included many who went on to illustrious careers, not the least of them Ernest L. Thayer, author of “Casey at the Bat,” and President Theodore Roosevelt. If the expression OK had lacked a little in respectability because of its association with low humor and New York politics, the company of the Harvard OK helped raise its status.

/>   But what did that OK stand for? It was one of the Harvard club’s most closely kept secrets, but Kloesel discovered in a letter from one of the founding members to another that it stood for “Orthoepy Klub.” Orthoepy is a ten-dollar word for “proper pronunciation,” and Klub is another not-so-klever misspelling in the tradition of Korrekt. (That explains why it was always referred to as “the OK” rather than redundantly “the OK Club.”) There’s an undergraduate sense of humor in pairing an elegant word with a misspelled simple one.

  9

  THE LITERARY OK

  THE HUMOR OF OK, ITS POLITICAL RELEVANCE, AND ITS everyday use in commerce and clubs might portend its widespread use in literature of the later part of the nineteenth century. Such, strangely enough, is not the case. The great American authors of the later nineteenth century, and the near-great, have one thing in common: They all avoid OK.

  You will search in vain for OK in the pages of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, and Holmes. Perhaps that’s not too surprising; although all of them lived at least a decade after OK was invented, all were born before 1809 and would have been in their thirties before they first had the opportunity to learn of it.

  Younger, in their twenties in 1839 at the time of the birth of OK, were Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Henry Dana, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Still no OKs, though these include the authors of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Song of Myself, works that easily might have included OK.