(Edward Everett Hale, a once influential author born in 1822, might be considered an exception because of his use of OK in “The Brick Moon,” published in 1870–71 and discussed here in Chapter 7. But in that story OK is strictly limited to a long-distance means of communication, not employed in conversation or narrative.)
Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Henry Adams were born in the 1830s and would have had the opportunity to encounter OK from their childhood. Nevertheless, they avoided OK. It doesn’t appear even in the dialect humor of Twain and Harte.
Born later than OK were Ambrose Bierce, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Whitcomb Riley, Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair—the list goes on and on. It is possible that an occasional OK lurks on an obscure page by one of those writers, but it is unquestionable that OK is about as plentiful in their writing as hens’ teeth.
There are two qualifications to that statement that only serve to confirm the deliberate avoidance of OK by literary writers. Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott both have single instances of OK—and both were removed in revision.
Thoreau’s Tailoress
Thoreau was the first. In 1850 he wrote in his journal,
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say: it surpasses her credulity. Properly speaking, my style is as fashionable as theirs. “They do not make them so now,” as if she quoted the Fates! I am for a moment absorbed in thought, thinking, wondering who they are, where they live. It is some Oak Hall, O call, O.K., all correct establishment which she knows but I do not. Oliver Cromwell. I emphasize and in imagination italicize each word separately of that sentence to come at the meaning of it.
Oak Hall was a “clothier’s establishment,” to use a phrase current then, and Thoreau is at his most playful as he turns the name into OK. But apparently he considered it too irrelevant, too distracting from his message to allow in print. The passage from the journal appears in Walden, published in 1854, with considerable revision:
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they”—“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.”
Thoreau was hardly a man to insist on gentility, or to avoid playing with language, but evidently he thought OK unsuited to his purpose.
Alcott’s Omitted Okay
The other exception—and subsequent omission—comes in the hugely successful and still well-known novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. If there were an annual prize for literary use of OK, in 1869 it would have been hers by default. It isn’t absolutely the first literary instance of OK, but it’s surprisingly modern, including the spelling okay. In fact, it is the first known instance of that four-letter spelling.
Little Women is the story of the spirited March sisters of Concord, Massachusetts. The most refined and artistic of the four sisters is Amy, who uses the more refined spelling okay in a letter from Heidelberg, Germany, to her mother in Massachusetts while on a tour of Europe with her aunt, uncle, and cousin. Amy explains why she’ll be ready to accept the English gentleman Fred Vaughn’s proposal of marriage if it comes:
I’ve made up my mind, and if Fred asks me, I shall accept him, though I’m not madly in love. I like him, and we get on comfortably together. He is handsome, young, clever enough, and very rich—ever so much richer than the Laurences.…
I may be mercenary, but I hate poverty, and don’t mean to bear it a minute longer than I can help. One of us must marry well. Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet, so I shall, and make everything okay all round. I wouldn’t marry a man I hated or despised. You may be sure of that, and though Fred is not my model hero, he does very well, and in time I should get fond enough of him if he was very fond of me, and let me do just as I liked. So I’ve been turning the matter over in my mind the last week, for it was impossible to help seeing that Fred liked me.…
Of course this is all very private, but I wished you to know what was going on. Don’t be anxious about me, remember I am your “prudent Amy,” and be sure I will do nothing rashly. Send me as much advice as you like. I’ll use it if I can. I wish I could see you for a good talk, Marmee. Love and trust me.
This passage comes in the second volume of Little Women, which Alcott wrote rapidly, early in 1869, in response to the commercial success of the first volume, published the year before. It is likely that she put okay in Amy’s letter without giving it a second thought. Alcott’s characters are not above using slang and colloquialisms.
Little Women was revised and refined for an 1880 edition. It’s not clear whether Alcott or her publisher made the changes, but they made the book noticeably more prim and proper, removing slang and regionalisms. Here is the central part of the passage involving okay in its 1880 version:
… One of us must marry well; Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet, so I shall, and make everything cozy all round. I wouldn’t marry a man I hated or despised. You may be sure of that, and, though Fred is not my model hero, he does very well, and, in time, I should get fond enough of him if he was very fond of me, and let me do just as I liked. So I’ve been turning the matter over in my mind the last week, for it was impossible to help seeing that Fred liked me.…
The editing adds a sprinkling of commas throughout the passage but makes only one change in vocabulary: cozy for okay. So much for what a fashionable young woman might actually have said or written to her mother.
Amy says earlier to her sisters: “You laugh at me when I say I want to be a lady, but I mean a true gentlewoman in mind and manners, and I try to do it as far as I know how. I can’t explain exactly, but I want to be above the little meannesses and follies and faults that spoil so many women.” Perhaps it is the mark of a gentlewoman to use the spelling okay rather than the more obtrusive OK. Incidentally, at the end, Amy doesn’t take up with Fred after all, but rather marries the Little Women’s childhood friend Laurie.
Ladies’ Slang
Clues about the attitude toward OK among nineteenth-century polite company may be found in The Ladies’ Repository, a monthly “devoted to literature, arts, and religion.” An 1874 article on Americanisms quotes a “bilious Englishman”: “certain common vulgarisms he regards as canonical and universal; for instance, ‘O. K.’” Two years later, Rev. J. W. M’Cormick remarks in an article called “Talkers and Talking”:
In the slang dialect every thing is exaggerated. It never rains but it pours. Nothing is simply nice or desirable. It is “awful nice” or “O. K.” or “bully.”
Vulgarism, slang … not quite suited to a young lady of fashion, perhaps.
In the Rough
But OK is not totally absent from fiction of the nineteenth century, if we look far enough. When OK does appear in the writing of lesser-known authors, it is mostly in dialogue by lower-class or rustic characters, indicating that it was recognized as slang, and that, outside of business uses, it belonged to spoken rather than written discourse. Perhaps the spelling OK for all correct implied its use by illiterates. To follow OK through nineteenth-century literature is to take a romp in the backwoods.
Neither low class nor illiteracy would hav
e prevented its use by Mark Twain, for example in the character of Huckleberry Finn, or by Bret Harte, but maybe for them too it was just too dumb a joke.
If they avoided OK, it couldn’t have been for being obscene or blasphemous, because by no stretch of the imagination does OK belong to either of those categories. It must have been simply that they considered OK beneath notice. It wasn’t very exciting, or picturesque, or emphatic. Run-of-the-mill writers put OK in the mouths of ignorant rustic stock characters; better writers found better, more colorful words.
There’s a Comedy of Fashion, first performed in New York City in 1845, featuring an ignorant would-be snob, Mr. Snobson, who can’t understand the bungled French of Mrs. Tiffany:
Mrs. Tiffany. (pointing to a chair with great dignity) Sassoyez vow, Monsur Snobson.
Snobson. I wonder what she’s driving at? I aint up to the fashionable lingo yet! (aside) Eh? what? Speak a little louder, Marm?
Mrs. Tiffany. What ignorance! (aside)
Mr. Tiffany. I presume Mrs. Tiffany means that you are to take a seat.
Snobson. Ex-actly—very obliging of her—so I will. (sits) No ceremony amonst friends, you know—and likely to be nearer—you understand? O. K., all correct. How is Seraphina?
Mrs. Tiffany. Miss Tiffany is not visible this morning.
In 1858 The Reformed Gambler, “the history of the later years of the life of Jonathan H. Green the Reformed Gambler,” tells of a steamboat on the Ohio River that took aboard from the “sucker state,” Illinois, “a party of men who bade fair, from appearance, to be a party not only susceptible of being fleeced, but one that would pay for the pains.” The boat’s clerk questions their captain’s request to be registered under a false name.
“Oh, all is O.K.!” replied the sucker captain, placing his fingers upon his nose. “I am a captain at present. Did you not see my men? Have I not paid their passages for the deck? That’s all!”—finishing the sentence by a request for the clerk, Roberts, and Captain Harris to keep “dark.”
There is The Arkansas Traveller’s Songster : “Containing the celebrated story of the Arkansas traveler, with the music for violin or piano. And also an extensive and choice collection of new and popular comic and sentimental songs,” published in New York City during the Civil War. The songs include a parody on “Mother, I’ve Come Home to Die,” “an original conglomeration of titles,” with the chorus:
“Call me pet names,” “Annie Lisle,”
“A bully boy with a glass eye”;
“Oh, let her rip! she’s all O. K.”—
“Dear mother, I’ve come home to die.”
Unfortunately, the source of the quotation in the third line remains elusive.
We can find another OK in The Book of Humour, Wit and Wisdom, published in Boston in 1874. Here is the complete story of “A Thoughtful Husband”:
The following story is told:—“I say, Cap’n!” cried a little keen-eyed man, as he landed from a steamer at Natchez, “I say, Cap’n, these here aren’t all. I have left somethin’ on board, that’s a fact.” “Them’s all the plunder you brought on board, anyhow,” answered the captain. “Wal, I see now; I grant it’s O.K. accordin’ to list; four boxes, three chests, two band-boxes, and portmanty; two hams, one part-cut, three ropes of inyens, and a tea-kettle. But see, Cap’n, I’m dubersome; I feel there’s somethin’ short, tho’ I’ve counted um nine times over, and never took my eyes off um while on board; there’s somethin’ not right, somehow.” “Wal, stranger, time’s up; thems all I knows on; so just fetch your wife and five children out of the cabin, cos I’m off.” “Thems um! Darn it, thems um! I know’d I’d forgot somethin’!”
In 1874 Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master. A Story of Today was published in New York City. An abusive husband has this conversation with his intimidated wife when he stumbles into his house at five in the morning:
“Has every thing gone right, John?” she asked.
“Yes, of course, the Judge is elected by a big majority. It’s been hard work; but it’s all O. K. now.”
“I didn’t mean that; but—but,” looking at him with an awful horror in her questioning eyes—“was there any row? any body hurt?”
The man drew his black brows together and turned on her fiercely.
The Wild West
In works of fiction, the vocabulary of rustic denizens of the Wild West at least now and then included OK. “A Singular Case,” a story of a search for a mine in the West published in 1883 in The Living Age, features extensive dialogue in dialect by old-timer Bill.
“Nary time,” replied Bill, “an’ thet’s the curos part o’ it—not so curos neither, wen ye think it over. This yer Burnfield must ha’ gone inter the Smoky Hill in ’57 at least. At thet time—but, demme, I allus git confused like wen I think back so fur—anyhow, I know Granite hedn’t no more’n six or eight houses then; an’ men wur all-fired skerce yer them days, an’ often came an’ went without tellin’ whur they come from or whur they was goin’. It wurn’t healthy to be too inquisitive, an’ ax too many questions. It wur like thet wen I first remember Granite, an’ thet wur—ah—nigh onto fourteen year ago. Nobody axed me whur I come from; mebbe I didn’t know—an’ I’m certing I didn’t care.”
This led later to:
“Wal,” said Bill, with considerable satisfaction, “that fixes us all O.K.”
In the 1890s, a number of stories in Overland Monthly included rustic characters whose vocabulary included OK. Readers of “A Night Ride in Apache Land” by W. R. Rowe in an 1892 issue were treated to this dialogue:
“Be sure and cinch ’em well, boys—we can’t stop to tighten ’em after we git started.”
“Ay, ay, yer kin bet on us, Jack.”
“Are yer all O. K.?”
“You bet.”
“Then head fer the Baldy Mountain an’ if ever you spurred, spur this night.”
In 1895 another Overland Monthly story, “Tim Slather’s Ride,” by Granville P. Hurst, has this comment on the eponymous hero by a “Mizzoorah” farmer:
“Mighty nice young fellow,” said farmer Hawley to his daughter, Bessie. “Gads about too much, an’ don’t seem to take natchelly to farm work. But I guess he’ll settle down stiddy when he gits married. ’Taint every young man as has sich prospects as him. Ole man Slathers’ll make ’im partner, if he’ll go to work an’ quit runnin’ ’round to every blame place whur he has a chance o’ showin’ off his ridin’. Tim’s all O. K. An’, Bessie,” added Mr. Hawley, lowering his voice and speaking slowly, as if in doubt just how, or how far, to proceed, “I sometimes kinder wish—’at you—an’ him”—and overcome with the ardor or magnitude of his wish, Mr. Hawley stuck fast on the words and came to a full stop.
In 1899, “Sweet Evalina” by Elwyn Irving Hoffman in Overland Monthly features a rustic bachelor farmer and storyteller who recalls his long-ago sweetheart, assuring his educated interlocutor that he doesn’t mind telling about it:
Clark laughed reassuringly. “O, that’s all O K,” he said; “it happened a long time ago, an’ don’t hurt me none now. A feller gits over things like that, you know, an’ I’d jest as soon tell you about her as not; only, there ain’t nothin’ to tell.”
In “How the Overalls Won: A Football Tale” by Carroll Carrington in a 1900 issue of the Overland Monthly, the cultivated narrator, an easterner, puts on a “drawl” in a mining camp, and “I was easily accepted for the ignoramus I wished them to think me.”
Driscol finally cleared his throat.
“Do you mean to say, you idiot, that you’re going to bring a foot-ball team up here tomorrow?” he demanded, indignantly.
“To-morrer,” I repeated affably. “Yep. Couldn’t get ’em here any sooner. Anyhow we couldn’t play on Sunday, and I didn’t get a chanst to tell the boys about you folks bein’ up here practicin’ until only a couple o’ days or so ago. But they’ll get here tomorrer all right, O. K., without fail, sure pop. Don’t you worry.”
At a somewhat higher literary level, Hamlin Garland, a regional writer of the Midwest and West still held in some esteem nowadays, doesn’t entirely shun OK in the narrative of his adventures in the Klondike gold rush, The Trail of the Goldseekers, published in 1899. Toward the end of the book he is returning to his Wisconsin home by train, solicitous of his beloved horse Ladrone, who is traveling by another train.
Leaving him a tub of water, I bade him good-by once more and started him for Helena, five hundred miles away.
At Missoula, the following evening, I rushed into the ticket office and shouted, “Where is ‘54’?”
The clerk knew me and smilingly extended his hand.
“How de do? She has just pulled out. The horse is all O K. We gave him fresh water and feed.”
OK Takes a Turn
So OK continued in that manner throughout the nineteenth century, known to writers and used by them occasionally, but not often, in dialogue involving pretentious, lowlife, or rustic characters. But as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, OK took a turn too. It was a subtle turn, because it still involved unsophisticated characters, but OK in its quiet way began to take on a role in humor and satire. This wasn’t new for OK; after all, it began as a joke, and for much of the nineteenth century it inspired humorous interpretations of the initials OK. But this time it was different. OK took on a secondary role, moving to the background as a natural accompaniment to the humor rather than the focus of it. We see this in three early twentieth-century writers: George Ade, Ring Lardner, and Sinclair Lewis. Perhaps it is no coincidence that all were from the Midwest rather than the East Coast.
Aided by Ade
George Ade was from Indiana and had his first success writing for Chicago newspapers. He was noted for incorporating smart everyday slang in his stories, and that included OK.
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