OK

by Metcalf, Allan;

  Here are some examples of the new twists on old OK. From a 1924 issue of George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury :

  Papa Satan, he said, Okey doke! Here we go round and round the old-time mulberry bush! When the woman say no, she really mean yes!

  From an article on contemporary slang in the Philadelphia Inquirer of June 16, 1929:

  As in non-collegiate circles, the ponderous O. K. has given way to the snappier “oke.” There is a sonorous note about this expression, the compiler says, which has made its vogue immense. Among elite slangsters, in fact, it has almost completely ousted older expressions.

  In 1934 a hearing before the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry elicited the testimony “that tying it up in this bill, it was all ‘okey-dokey.’”

  The “Notes and Comment” section of the New Yorker for February 23, 1935, offered a variant spelling:

  It’s been quite a month.… A witness in a civil action in Seattle stopped the trial when he answered “Oakie-doke” to a question.

  And the Log, the publication of the American Society of Marine Engineers, reported in 1935 from the heartland:

  SOUTH DAKOTA.—Everything is okey-doke (excuse it, please) as the state is slopping around in the mud in a way it hasn’t done in several years. It’s such a striking change from last year.

  It shows up in Streamline for Health by Philip Bovier Hawk, a diet book published by Harper & Brothers in 1935:

  Simply subtract 450 calories from your regular food intake and everything will be okey dokey.

  William Faulkner’s novel about flying, Pylon, published in 1935, includes among its characters Jiggs, a mechanic:

  “Okey doke,” Jiggs said. The aeroplane waddled out and onto the runway and turned and stopped.

  In the New Yorker in 1936, humorist James Thurber was inspired to respond with okie-dokie to a book titled Wake Up and Live! :

  Now Mrs. Dorothea Brande has written a book and Simon & Schuster have published it, with the grim purpose in mind of getting me and all the other woolgatherers mentally organized so that, in a world which is going to pieces, we can be right up on our toes.… I don’t want a copy of the book; in fact, I don’t need one. I have got the gist of the idea of “Wake Up and Live!” from reading an advertisement for it in the Sunday Times book section. The writer of the ad said that Mrs. Brande in her inspirational volume suggests “twelve specific disciplines,” and he names these, in abbreviated form. I’ll take them up in order and show why it is no use for Mrs. Brande to try to save me if these disciplines are all she has to offer:

  …

  “9. Eliminate the phrases ‘I mean’ and “As a matter of fact’ from your conversation.”

  Okie-dokie.

  “10. Plan to live two hours a day according to a rigid time schedule.”

  Well, I usually wake up at nine in the morning and lie there till eleven.

  The phrase was associated with the rustic language of farmers in the 1938 Federal Writers’ Project book Delaware: A Guide to the First State.

  The Delaware section of US 13 runs more than one-half the length of the so-called Delmarva Peninsula, the low-lying and water-bound region east of Chesapeake Bay that contains the State of Delaware and the Eastern Shores of Maryland and Virginia.

  Bordered by few famous buildings and no battlefields or natural wonders but by a countryside of comfortable farmsteads, busy towns and villages, and numerous vistas of quiet beauty, the route is notable for the successive differences and contrasts, great and small, in the aspect of the country and in the life of the people. Within 25 miles there may be differences in terrain, forestation, style or material of old houses, political color, crops and farming methods, tempo of living, accent and expression of speech. A farmer who lives in the southern part of the State and drives a truck-load of vegetables to Wilmington every week, may say “oakie-doke” in one breath and then speak of “housen” for houses, or of a chicken too long killed as “dainty.”

  Joe Falls, in the 1977 book 50 Years of Sports Writing (and I Still Can’t Tell the Difference Between a Slider and a Curve), indicates one of the consequences of choosing okey-dokey: In a serious statement, it doesn’t inspire as much confidence as plain OK.

  Another time we were flying to Kansas City on a four-engine plane when one of the engines conked out. The pilot told us he had to “feather” it because it was giving him some trouble. No problem, though, he said. He would just detour to Chicago and everything would be okey-dokey. That’s what he said. Okey-dokey.

  As I walked down the aisle, I could feel my feet pressing into the floor. Okey-dokey, my butt.

  Jump ahead to August 1994 and the Misc. Newsletter, a report on popular culture in Seattle and beyond by Clark Humphrey:

  PR LINE OF THE WEEK (postcard to a band’s mailing list): “This is a postcard to promote ‘Running with Scissors’ and to tell you things are going to be okie dokie.… The Scissors Manifesto: 1. Attending our shows and buying our CDs are the keys to ‘okie dokie-ness.’ 2. People who request our songs on the radio are okie dokie. 3. Actually, sex is much better than ‘okie dokie-ness’ but no one will pay us for sex. 4. It would be really great if young people had a reason to feel better than just okie dokie. 5. Foul tasting, over-hyped beverages do not make you feel okie dokie … Not affiliated with any patronizing multinational beverage company.”

  As OK did in certain nineteenth-century contexts, okey-dokey in recent times can suggest lack of education, or more positively, simplicity of character. In And the Angels Laughed: 101 Anecdotes and Devotionals (2007), Barbara Eubanks tells of a lady who came down the aisle and told the pastor she wanted to be saved. He asked her if she wanted to talk to the Lord about it.

  She replied, “I done did.”

  “Well, what did he say?” prodded the pastor.

  “He said, ‘Okey-dokey.’”

  I’m not sure what colloquial expressions the Lord uses, but

  I’m sure he speaks to people in terms they understand.

  The playfulness of okey-dokey is evident when it turns up as the name for a recipe in Fondue by Lenny Rice and Brigid Callinan, published in 2007. The artichoke fondue “Okey-dokey Artichokey” is to be paired with Austrian grüner veltliner, which “has a crisp, peppery quality that makes it one of the only reliable artichoke-friendly wines we know.”

  Perhaps the name of the recipe was inspired by a children’s book published four years earlier, Okie-dokie, Artichokie! by Grace Lin. That’s the story of a new downstairs neighbor named Artichoke who bangs mysteriously on his ceiling, the protagonist’s floor. “Hey, if I get too loud or something, you can just bang on the ceiling and let me know,” says the protagonist, who happens to be a monkey. The downstairs neighbor is a giraffe, hence the inadvertent banging.

  And there’s a fictitious Okie-Dokie Corral in Houston, where the Cheetah Girls, a group of young African American singers in search of success, compete against their archrivals the Cash Money Girls in Showdown at the Okie-Dokie (2000), number 9 in the Cheetah Girls series, aimed at girls in grades four through six.

  Like OK itself, okey-dokey has traveled around the world, or so we gather from Autumn Cornwell’s 2007 novel Carpe Diem, narrated by an overachieving sixteen-year-old who backpacks in Southeast Asia with a relative. In Cambodia, she orders from Peppy Pete of Peppy Pete’s Pizzeria:

  “So, one large pizza with everything—okey-dokey! Extra peppy?”

  “Peppy? Oh, no. Nothing remotely spicy or peppy for me.”

  “Okey-dokey!”

  “Oh, and a bottle of Chianti,” I said, but added hurriedly: “For my grandma.”

  “Okey-dokey smokey!” And he waddled off.

  Of all present-day users of expanded versions of OK, however, the most famous is a cartoon character. Ned Flanders, the Simpsons’ utterly good-natured and devoutly Christian next-door neighbor, is noted for extending the two-syllable OK into the six-syllable okely-dokely. He stretches out oth
er words too, as in two 1993 episodes:

  Ned: Hi-di-ly-hey, Camper Bart! You ready for today’s meeting?

  Bart: You know-dilly know it, Neddy.

  Ned: Okely-dokely!

  Todd (Ned’s son): We’re not going to church today!

  Ned: What? You give me one good reason.

  Todd: It’s Saturday.

  Ned: Okely-dokeley-doo!

  In a 1996 episode, Homer prompts Ned to say it:

  Ned: Homer, ah … About those things you borrowed from me over the years, you know, the TV trays, the power sander, the downstairs bathtub … You gonna be needing those things in Cypress Creek?

  Homer: Yes.

  Ned: Oh. Uh …

  Homer: Okely-dokely.

  Ned: Okely-dokely.

  By now, okey-dokey (and variants like okely-dokely) has long lost its freshness—hence its suitability for a not-so-cool character like Ned Flanders. For some, it’s an annoyance. Slang expert Tom Dalzell, in The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2007), acknowledges that okey-dokey is “used for communicating agreement,” but he can’t resist grumbling that it is “an old-fashioned, affected, still popular perversion of OK.”

  The Old Okey-Doke

  There’s another not so comical meaning for okey-doke, one that presidential candidate Barack Obama used in speaking to a predominantly African American audience in Sumter, South Carolina, on January 23, 2008. He said, in part:

  The point is, part of what happens in Washington is folks will twist your words around, trying to pretend you said something you didn’t say, trying to pretend you didn’t say something you did. We know that game. But that’s the kind of politics that we’ve got to change.…

  So don’t be confused when you hear a whole bunch of this negative stuff. Those are the same old tricks. They’re trying to bamboozle you. It’s the same old okey-doke. Y’all know about okey-doke, right? It’s the same old stuff.

  It’s like if anybody gets one of these e-mails saying, “Obama is a Muslim.” I’ve been a member of the same church for almost twenty years, praying to Jesus, with my Bible. Don’t let people turn you around. Because they’re just making stuff up. That’s what they do. They try to bamboozle you. Hoodwink you. Try to hoodwink you.

  In case anyone didn’t know that definition of okey-doke, candidate Obama was liberal with paraphrase: tricks, same old stuff, bamboozle, hoodwink. But the audience probably did, since that meaning of okey-doke is current in the African American community.

  It goes back a while. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang has examples of this meaning as early as 1967. Researcher Ben Zimmer found okey-doke in a 1989 quotation from Spike Lee (“We got robbed, gypped, jerked around—they gave us the okeydoke”) and from Ice Cube in the movie Trespass (“They’re lying to you, K.J., laughing behind your back, got us going for the okeydoke”).

  And on a community forum website for Southport, Connecticut, in December 2008, “The Judge” posted this comment regarding the United Illuminating Company:

  Right you are DPUC, it’s the same old-same old, okey-dokey! One day these guys are on opposite fences, the next, they are sitting around at fundraisers together and scoffing down pigs in a blanket and cheap chablis.

  12

  MODERN OK LITERATURE

  AS WE HAVE SEEN IN CHAPTER 8, THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH century brought a turn in the literary fortunes of OK. It never became the subject of a famous poem or the focus of a novel, but gradually it became OK to use OK in works of fiction without raising eyebrows. OK, sometimes in its more unobtrusive form okay, had lost its connotation of slang as it lost the memory of its silly origin. The literature of the past eighty years shows OK fully at home in its present-day uses.

  For example, in Damon Runyon’s short story “‘Gentlemen, the King!’” published in Collier’s magazine in 1931 and narrated in his distinctive pseudo-elegant gangster slang, okay plays a role:

  So this lawyer takes me to the Ritz-Carlton hotel, and there he introduces me to a guy by the name of Count Saro, and the lawyer says he will okay anything Saro has to say to me 100 per cent, and then he immediately takes the wind as if he does not care to hear what Saro has to say. But I know this mouthpiece is not putting any proposition away as okay unless he knows it is pretty much okay, because he is a smart guy at his own dodge, and everything else, and has plenty of coco-nuts.

  Henry Miller’s 1934 Tropic of Cancer, in between the erotic passages that prevented its publication in the United States for a quarter century, includes some OKs:

  Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros, is O.K.

  If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him—It’s O.K. with me.

  Zora Neale Hurston has an OK—just one—in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about African American communities in Florida:

  “ … Ah set in de kitchen one day and heard dat woman tell mah wife Ah’m too black fuh her.…”

  …

  “So she live offa our money and don’t lak black folks, huh? O.K. we’ll have her gone from here befo’ two weeks is up. Ah’m goin’ right off tuh all de men and drop rocks aginst her.”

  Ezra Pound, poet and pro-Fascist, had his own way with OK. In a 1938 letter from Rapallo, Italy, where he was living, to President Joseph Brewer of Olivet College declining the offer of a job and complaining about “the bestiality of curricula” at colleges, Pound comments:

  Another question re/dissociation of ideas … The student shd SEE the actual producer. O. Kay. that is one side of the problem. I wonder if Ford [Madox Ford] has clearly cut it away from the other.… A country which does not FEED its best writers is a mere stinking dung heap.

  William Faulkner was not above using an occasional OK, though it is scarce in his works. Here it is in his 1939 novella The Old Man :

  “Take a drink or two. Give yourself time to feel it. If it’s not good, no use in bringing it.”

  “O.K.,” the deputy said.

  John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), with its down-to-earth characters, has several dozen examples, including these:

  “If you men want to sit here on your ass, O.K. I’m out getting men for Tulare County.”

  “O.K.,” he said tiredly. “O.K. I shouldn’, though. I know it.”

  Raymond Chandler, chronicler of the Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe, preferred the spelling okey in his novels, including The Big Sleep (1939):

  The purring voice from over in the shadows said: “Cut out the heavy menace, Art. This guy’s in a jam. You run a garage, don’t you?”

  “Thanks,” I said, and didn’t look at him even then.

  “Okey, okey,” the man in the coveralls grumbled. He tucked his gun through a flap in his clothes and bit a knuckle, staring at me moodily over it.

  And in Farewell, My Lovely (1940), after Marlowe has been drugged:

  I sat up once more and planted my feet on the floor and stood up.

  “Okey, Marlowe,” I said between my teeth. “You’re a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounds stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it. You’ve been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all that amount to? Routine. Now let’s see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on.”

  That spelling even comes through in a Portuguese translation:

  “Okey, Marlowe,” falei entre os dentes, “você é durão.…”

  OK is found in the American hero’s thoughts in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940):

  But you have behaved O.K.

  But with the wire length you are using it’s O.K., Robert Jordan thought.

  Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man uses OK in a variety of ways:

  “Okay, okay, take it easy,” Halley said.

  “Okay now,” he said, “
you can try to kid me but don’t say I didn’t wake you.”

  “Okay, brothers,” the voice said, “let him pass.”

  “You’re all right, boy. You’re okay. You just be patient,” said the voice.

  OK shows up near the beginning of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953):

  “Sure, she’ll be okay. We got all the mean stuff right in our suitcase here, it can’t get at her now.”

  John Updike’s 1959 Rabbit, Run includes OKs in dialogue:

  “Yeah. O.K. I’ll be right out.”

  “It’s O.K., I’ll pay, ” Rabbit says.

  OK is scattered throughout Joseph Heller’s World War II satire Catch-22 (1961):

  “Now, you go home and try it my way for a few months and see what happens. Okay?” “Okay,” they said.

  “Okay, fatmouth, out of the car,” Chief Halfoat ordered.

  Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1965) makes liberal use of OK in dialogue:

  “O.K., sugar—whatever you say.” Dick started the car.

  “O.K. The first show was called ‘The Man and the Challenge.’ Channel 11.”

  He unlocked the door and said, “O.K. Let’s go.”

  “Oh, they’re together O.K. But driving a different car.”

  Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II semi-memoir Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) uses OK too:

  “You’re all right, Sandy,” I’ll say to the dog. “You know that, Sandy? You’re O.K.”

  And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I said, “O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.”

  Toni Morrison has OKs in Song of Solomon (1977):