Ade helped make OK cool. Until Ade came along, OK was the language of the uncouth, but his satirical Fables in Slang series includes OK in the vocabulary of a knowing narrator. From More Fables (1900), his second collection, OK appears in “The Fable of the Regular Customer and the Copper-Lined Entertainer,” about a Country Customer who is wined and dined past remembrance by a designated employee of a wholesale concern, thereby ensuring the customer’s business:
The Head of the Concern put his O.K. on a Voucher for $43.60, and it occurred to him that Stereopticon Lectures seemed to be Advancing, but he asked no Questions.
Several more OKs found their way into Ade’s next collection of modern fables, People You Know (1903). This is from “The Search for the Right House and How Mrs. Jump Had Her Annual Attack”:
Mother was looking for a House that had twice as many Closets as Rooms and a Southern Exposure on all four sides.
She had conned herself into the Belief that some day she would run down a Queen Anne Shack that would be O.K. in all Particulars.
Also from People You Know, “The Summer Vacation That Was Too Good to Last”:
It was a lovely Time-Table that he had mapped out. He submitted it to Pet before she went away and she put her O.K. on it, even though her Heart ached for him.
Ade’s 1904 fable “The Night-Watch and the Would-be Something Awful,” about “a full-sized Girl named Florine whose Folks kept close Tab on her,” ends with an OK moral:
Florine would have remained a Dead Card if she had not gone on a Visit to a neighboring City where she bumped into the Town Trifler. He had a Way of proposing to every Girl the first time he met her. It always seemed to him such a cordial Send-Off for a budding Friendship. Usually the Girl asked for Time and then the two of them would Fiddle around and Fuss and Make Up and finally send back all the Letters and that would be the Finish. Florine fooled the foxy Philander. The Moment he came at her with the Marriage Talk she took a firm Hold and said, “You’re on! Get your License to-morrow morning. Then cut all the Telegraph Wires and burn the Railroad Bridges.”
They were Married, and, strange as it may appear, Mother immediately resigned her Job as Policeman and said: “Thank goodness, I’ve got you Married Off! Now you can do as you please.”
When Florine found that she could do as she pleased she discovered that there wasn’t very much of anything to do except Settle Down. After about seven Chafing-Dish Parties she expended her whole Stock of pent-up Ginger and now she is just as Quiet as the rest of us.
MORAL: Any System is O.K. if it finally Works Out.
You Know Me, Al
What Ade did for OK was significant, but it pales in comparison with the contribution of Ring Lardner, another newspaperman and humorist from Chicago. He adopted the persona of a naive, self-important, semiliterate baseball player, a pitcher who is signed by the Chicago White Sox and who writes to a friend back home about big-league baseball. The serialized columns were collected in You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters Home, published in 1916. The letters abound with OK, some forty-two instances according to Google Books. Here the fictional Jack Keefe tells of negotiating a contract with the (real) White Sox owner, Charles Comiskey:
We kidded each other back and forth like that a while and then he says You better go out and get the air and come back when you feel better. I says I feel O.K. now and I want to sign a contract because I have got to get back to Bedford.
Later, Jack ponders a marital problem, using four OKs:
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JANUERY 31.
Al : Allen is going to take Marie with him on the training trip to California and of course Florrie [Jack’s new wife] has been at me to take her along. I told her postivly that she can’t go. I can’t afford no stunt like that but still I am up against it to know what to do with her while we are on the trip because Marie won’t be here to stay with her. I don’t like to leave her here all alone but they is nothing to it Al I can’t afford to take her along. She says I don’t see why you can’t take me if Allen takes Marie. And I says That stuff is all O.K. for Allen because him and Marie has been grafting off of us all winter. And then she gets mad and tells me I should not ought to say her sister was no grafter. I did not mean nothing like that Al but you don’t never know when a woman is going to take offense. If our furniture was down in Bedford everything would be all O.K. because I could leave her there and I would feel all O.K. because I would know that you and Bertha would see that she was getting along O.K. But they would not be no sense in sending her down to a house that has not no furniture in it. I wish I knowed somewheres where she could visit Al. I would be willing to pay her bord even.
WELL AL ENOUGH FOR THIS TIME.
YOUR OLD PAL, JACK.
Lardner’s famous 1915 short story “Alibi Ike,” about another baseball player who “never pulled a play, good or bad, on or off the field, without apologizin’ for it,” includes more examples:
“You got a swell girl, Ike,” I says.
“She’s a peach,” says Smitty.
“Well, I guess she’s O. K.,” says Ike. “I don’t know much about girls.”
“Didn’t you never run round with ’em?” I says.
“Oh, yes, plenty of ’em,” says Ike. “But I never seen none I’d fall for.”
“That is, till you seen this one,” says Carey.
“Well,” says Ike, “this one’s O. K., but I wasn’t thinkin’ about gettin’ married yet a wile.”
Lardner’s 1920 novel The Big Town is about a couple from South Bend, Indiana, who inherit money and move to New York City with the wife’s sister. The wife looks for an apartment, and the husband, who is the narrator, comments:
Well, they showed me over the whole joint and it did look O.K., but not $4,000 worth. The best thing in the place was a half full bottle of rye in the kitchen that the cripple hadn’t gone south with. I did.
A famous aviator invites him to take a ride:
Well, the four of us set there and talked about this and that, and Codd said he hadn’t had time to get his machine put together yet, but when he had her fixed and tested her a few times he would take me up for a ride.
“You got the wrong number,” I says. “I don’t feel flighty.”
“Oh, I’d just love it!” said Kate.
“Well,” says Codd, “you ain’t barred. But I don’t want to have no passengers along till I’m sure she’s working O.K.”
The language is pointedly nonstandard, but here and elsewhere in Lardner’s writing OK is put to its modern everyday uses. It is no longer a funny abbreviation but a breezy way of indicating that matters are all right.
Ring Lardner’s example was catching. In 1921 Donald Ogden Stewart, another humorist and later a member of the witty Algonquin Round Table, wrote A Parody Outline of History, with each chapter in the style of a noted contemporary author, among them Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, and Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 5 is “The Spirit of ’75: Letters of a Minute Man in the Manner of Ring Lardner.” Here’s that Minute Man:
FRIEND ETHEN—
Well Ethen you will be surprised O. K. to hear I & the wife took a little trip down to Boston last wk. to a T. party & I guess you are thinking we will be getting the swelt hed over being ast to a T. party. In Boston.
And later:
After supper I & her was walking a round giving the town the double O when we seen that Fanny Ewell Hall was all lit up like Charley Davis on Sat. night & I says to Prudence lets go inside I think its free and she says I bet you knowed it was free al right befor you ast me & sure enough it was free only I hadnt knowed it before only I guess that Prudence knows that when I say a thing it is generally O. K.
And finally, on a historical occasion:
Well the other night I and Prudence was sound asleep when I heard some body banging at the frt. door & I stuck my head out the up stares window & I says who are you & he says I am Paul Revear & I says well this is a h—ll of a time to be wakeing a peaceiful man out of their b
ed what do you want & he says the Brittish are comeing & I says o are they well this is the 19 of April not the 1st & I was going down stares to plank him 1 but he had rode away tow wards Lexington before I had a chanct & as it turned out after words the joke was on me O. K.
Sinclair Lewis: OK Businessmen
George Ade and Ring Lardner were out-and-out humorists. Sinclair Lewis, though a satirist, wasn’t, so his use of OK in dialogue reflects its acceptance as a normal component of American conversation, at least in the business world he satirizes. Here’s a passage from his 1914 novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man:
That same afternoon the manager enthusiastically O. K.’d the plan. To enthusiastically-O. K. is an office technology for saying, gloomily, “Well, I don’t suppose it ‘d hurt to try it, anyway, but for the love of Mike be careful, and let me see any letters you send out.”
So Mr. Wrenn dictated a letter to each of their Southern merchants, sending him a Dixieland Ink-well and inquiring about the crops. He had a stenographer, an efficient intolerant young woman who wrote down his halting words as though they were examples of bad English she wanted to show her friends, and waited for the next word with cynical amusement.
And from Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street:
Despite Aunt Bessie’s nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, “Sure, religion is a fine influence—got to have it to keep the lower classes in order—fact, it’s the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes ’em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do.”
Lewis’s 1922 satire Babbitt likewise has examples of OK in dialogue. Here is one:
This fellow Graff you got working for you, he leases me a house. I was in yesterday and signs the lease, all O.K., and he was to get the owner’s signature and mail me the lease last night.
Later a speaker addresses the Boosters’ Club:
Some of you may feel that it’s out of place here to talk on a strictly highbrow and artistic subject, but I want to come out flatfooted and ask you boys to O.K. the proposition of a Symphony Orchestra for Zenith. Now, where a lot of you make your mistake is in assuming that if you don’t like classical music and all that junk, you ought to oppose it.
These authors who used OK in modern ways may not have instigated the change from the old funny abbreviation, but they reflected it. By the time the twentieth century was well under way, OK had moved from the fringe of American English to the center.
10
OKLAHOMA IS OK
WAIT A MINUTE. WHAT ABOUT OKLAHOMA?
Oklahoma is OK, no doubt about it. It’s not just the postal abbreviation; it’s even proclaimed on license plates and T-shirts, and it’s the inspiration for business names in Oklahoma, everything from OK Paintless Dent Repairs in Duncan to OK Goat Coop, a goat farm in Tulsa.
And yet Oklahoma is a Johnny-come-lately to the world of OK. It could have played a role in the nineteenth- or early twentieth-century development of OK, but it was only in the mid-twentieth century when the connection between Oklahoma and OK became prominent.
The connection could have begun as long ago as 1866, when the name Oklahoma was proposed for the newly legislated Indian Territory that was the predecessor of the state. Chief Allen Wright of the Choctaw Indians suggested Oklahoma, literally “red people,” used in Choctaw to designate all Native Americans. This became the name of the territory in 1890 and remained the name when Oklahoma attained statehood in 1907. But it wasn’t abbreviated OK.
The distinctive word associated with Oklahoma in its early days was not OK but sooner. When the federal government opened the “Unassigned Lands” of Indian Territory with a land run across the territorial border at noon on April 22, 1889, the settlers who rushed in found that certain others had managed to arrive there sooner to stake their claims. Among the “sooners” were surveyors, railroad men, and officers of the law, who had legitimate reasons for being in the territory early and who took the opportunity to stake out the best 160-acre plots for themselves. A somewhat grudging admiration for their initiative led to Oklahoma eventually being labeled the Sooner State, even by Oklahomans. Better, perhaps, than the Hoosier State for Indiana, or the Sucker State for Illinois. For better or worse, it had nothing to do with OK.
Nor did the state’s motto, adopted by the Territorial Legislative Assembly in 1893. To this day Oklahoma’s Great Seal bears the legend “Labor Omnia Vincit,” not from an Indian language or from English but from the poet Virgil’s classical Latin, “Labor Conquers All.”
The state flag likewise makes no use of OK. Its first version was simply a white star with the number 46 (for the forty-sixth state) on a red background. The next and current flag has an Indian motif, a warrior’s shield crossed by a peace pipe, on a blue background with the name of the state beneath. No abbreviation.
And for many years the official postal abbreviation, as well as the one used in newspapers, was the four-letter Okla.
It took many years, and a song and ZIP code, to bring Oklahoma and OK together.
The song, of course, is from the 1943 musical Oklahoma! Written by Oscar Hammerstein II in his first collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers, the song was such a hit that it became the title of the musical, displacing the original Away We Go! The musical was based on a 1931 play by Jean Riggs, Green Grow the Rushes, but that play has nary an OK.
It’s not as if OK permeates the musical, however. It’s absent until the very end. But there it holds a strategic place, repeated three times at the end of the refrain of the final song. It’s the very last word as the curtain comes down and the audience begins to applaud. Here is that ending, with the spelling used in Oklahoma Statutes Title 25, Chapter 3, Section 94.3, when “Oklahoma!” was adopted as the official state song in 1953:
… We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say—Yeeow! A-yip-i-o-ee ay!
We’re only sayin’ You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma—O.K.
That popular musical was the first big step in making OK at home in Oklahoma, and it prepared the way for the next. In 1963 the U.S. Post Office introduced ZIP codes and with them two-letter abbreviations for each state. What else could stand for Oklahoma besides OK? Even the distinctive practice of capitalizing both letters of the abbreviation encouraged the connection. Thus Oklahoma was transformed from Okla. to OK.
And that, in turn, evidently was the inspiration for the legend on the state license plate, “Oklahoma Is OK,” first issued in 1967. It was followed in 1987 by the shorter declaration “Oklahoma OK!”
Today, making use of the abbreviation, there are businesses like OK Handyman and OK Alliance for Manufacturing Excellence, in Tulsa, and in Oklahoma City you’ll find OK Experts LLC, a handyman service, and OK Nails, a beauty shop. But there really aren’t that many Oklahoma businesses with OK in their names. A comedian can draw a laugh at the slogan “Oklahoma is OK.” And even if it’s not a joke, as we have noted in a previous chapter, OK just doesn’t imply much enthusiasm.
So Oklahoma could have played a starring role in the history of OK. Instead, it’s just OK.
11
OKEY-DOKEY
BY THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, OK WAS NO LONGER a joke. The letters O and K did not prompt memories of the misspelled oll korrect, nor did they stimulate alternative explanations. In the nineteenth century, OK was recognized as a humorous abbreviation, but in the twentieth, it was understood merely as an arbitrary combination of letters of the alphabet.
The very look of OK underwent a change. In the nineteenth century, OK almost always appeared with periods, identifying it as an abbreviation. In the twentieth, however, the periods increasingly were absent. And in the twentieth century, more and more it was spelled okay, completely distancing it from any abbreviation and transforming it into an ordinary word.
The meaning of OK was simplified in the twentieth century too. Almost from the date of its birth, in the nineteenth century the abbreviation OK was subject to reinterpretation, beginning with Old Kinderhook and continuing with numerous humorous inventions, as well as the names of clubs. As the twentieth century got under way, those alternatives faded, leaving OK for the most part with the plain, sober definition “all right.”
Gaining familiarity rather than passion, OK also gained the abbreviation oke in the 1920s, and kay or just plain k, both in writing (nowadays including text messages and e-mail) and speaking.
Along with the draining of humor from OK came the draining of enthusiasm, or indeed of any emotion. In 1840 the OK Clubs could inspire voters to support Old Kinderhook for reelection. The clubs formed later in the nineteenth century, from the Harvard OK on down, likewise kept OK spirited. In occasional literary use, OK often colorfully evoked the voice of a decidedly backwoods character. But by the early twentieth century, OK had become value-neutral. It remained affirmative, but it imparted no attributes, admirable or otherwise, as it remains today. When a friend nowadays asks “What do you think of my garden?” to answer “OK” is likely to make the respondent the target of a flowerpot. You’d better use a value word like wonderful or perfect. Even terrible shows more emotional involvement than OK.
So OK no longer was a joke or a showstopper. In the nineteenth century, OK stood out, but in the twentieth, OK was just OK.
To make OK funny in the twentieth century, or to give it emphasis, it needed a twist. And the Roaring Twenties came up with it—several twists, in fact. Beginning in the 1920s we find such twists as okey-dokey and oke-doke, leading up to the okely-dokely now used by cartoon character Ned Flanders on the television show The Simpsons.
The rise of okey-dokey and its relatives took away the pressure on OK to be funny. Once okey-dokey made its appearance, any vestige of humor associated with OK fled to its polysyllabic progeny, leaving OK free of all remaining traces of playfulness. We are inclined to smile when we hear okey-dokey; we hear plain OK with a straight face. The expression born as a blatant joke a century earlier had now become a sober workhorse, ready to undertake ventures in pragmatics and psychology in the postwar years.
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