“Okay,” Freddie said, and threw up his hands. “Okay, laugh on. But they’s a lot of strange things you don’t know nothin about, boy.”
and in Beloved (1987):
“Some?” he smiled. “Okay. Here’s some. There’s a carnival in town. Thursday, tomorrow, is for coloreds.…”
Celie, the narrator in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), uses OK:
She giggle. Okay, she say. Nobody coming. Coast clear.
Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1982 collection Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) includes OK in the title story:
“This is a pretty place. Your mama was right.”
“It’s O.K.,” says Norma Jean.
and in “The Rookers”:
“Fluoride’s O.K. It hardens the teeth.”
These examples have been from the mid- and late twentieth century, but twenty-first-century writers continue to be comfortable with OK, sprinkling it more or less sparingly in their writing. Tom Wolfe’s hefty 2004 novel of modern college life, I Am Charlotte Simmons, has a whole chapter titled “You Okay?” It’s the one thing Charlotte’s date at a fraternity formal in Washington, D.C., says to her when he takes her virginity in a drunken, sweaty episode in a hotel room. “Are you okay?” he asks, to which she murmurs “Mmnnnnh,” wishing she could yell at him to stop. And then when he is finished:
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” he went, in a tone of immense satisfaction as he rolled over completely on his back. And then he said, “You okay?”
After that, Hoyt and the others who come and go in the hotel room ignore her except occasionally to wonder whether she is OK, when obviously she isn’t. Then at the end of the chapter:
Dreadfully hung over, a malady she had never experienced before, Charlotte had a brief coughing spasm in Maryland, and Hoyt said, “You okay?”
She went, “Mmmnh,” just so he would have a response, and she wouldn’t say anything more. A couple of hours later, as he let her out in front of Little Yard, he said, “You okay?”
She didn’t so much as glance at him. She just walked away with her boat bag. He didn’t ask twice.
And Stephen King doesn’t shy from OK in his 2008 novel Duma Key, where it appears more than eighty times:
“Okay,” Ilse said at last.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’m worried.”
Things on Duma Key had been okay … then strange … then for a long time they’d been okay again. And now …
“Edgar?” Jack touched my elbow. “Okay?”
I was not okay, and wouldn’t be okay for a long time again.
As these examples show, present-day writers employ OK without hesitation, particularly in dialogue, reflecting the present-day use of OK in actual everyday speech. Yet OK seems not to be as frequent in fiction as it is in real life. It’s just OK, not much of a spicy ingredient for crackling dialogue.
There’s a notable exception, however, that is saturated with numerous OKs. It is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), about a man and his young son (about ten years old) wandering through a postapocalyptic American landscape where the sun never shines and every living thing has died except a few surviving and desperate humans. Much of the book is dialogue, and you can scarcely find a page of dialogue without OK. The dialogue itself is bleak, stripped bare of quotation marks and some other punctuation marks, like this, near the beginning of the book:
Okay.
Okay what?
Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That’s okay.
In the middle:
He looked down at the old man and he looked at the road. All right, he said. But then tomorrow we go on.
The boy didnt answer.
That’s the best deal you’re going to get.
Okay.
Okay means okay. It doesnt mean we negotiate another deal
tomorrow.
What’s negotiate?
It means talk about it some more and come up with some other deal. There is no other deal. This is it.
Okay.
Okay.
And near the end:
Just dont give up. Okay?
Okay.
Okay.
I’m really scared Papa.
I know. But you’ll be okay. You’re going to be lucky. I know you are. I’ve got to stop talking. I’m going to start coughing again.
It’s okay, Papa. You dont have to talk. It’s okay.
McCarthy himself, like most of us, is a bona fide user of OK. Interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 2007, he said, “You’d like for the people who would appreciate the book to read it. But as far as having many people reading it, so what? It’s OK. Nothing wrong with it.”
In a November 2009 discussion with a Wall Street Journal writer, McCarthy said, “A lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had.” Actual present-day conversations abound with OK, so that might account for its abundance in the book. And OK is only in the dialogue, not the third-person narration.
But perhaps also, OK seems suited to the end of the world, at least in McCarthy’s vision, as it fades from gray to black.
13
THE PRACTICAL OK
DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, OK MADE ITSELF EVER more useful by keeping pace with new technology and an old sport. OK is at home in radio, baseball, outer space, and above all the computer. These places have made OK all the more OK, less and less with any aura of slang, and of course unfathomably distant from its joking birth.
Early in the twentieth century, radio became commercial and took OK with it, in the form of the OK sign. In the heyday of live radio broadcasting in 1946, Paul Beath described the context in the journal American Speech :
Anyone who has witnessed a radio broadcast of any complexity knows that the director sits behind a sound proof glass with the engineer and directs his artists—vocal and instrumental—by means of a sign language.…
[O]nce the director has regulated the tempo, volume, or tone of his production to his liking, he tells his artists by means of a sign that the show is going “O.K.” This he does by joining his thumb and forefinger in the shape of an “O” with other fingers extended.
This happens also to be the sign for OK in American Sign Language. And it’s also the basis for a pitch in baseball known as the “OK change.” A change, or change-up, is a pitch thrown like a fastball but slower, the change of pace intended to disrupt the batter’s timing. What makes the pitch slower is the grip. A fastball uses the index and middle fingers, along with the thumb. A change, on the other hand, uses the middle and ring fingers, keeping the stronger index finger out of the action. In an OK change, also known as a circle change, the pitcher touches index finger and thumb at the side of the ball, thus making the OK sign and giving that pitch its name.
When Americans began traveling in space, they brought OK with them. In fact, thanks to the manned space program of the 1960s, OK gave birth to its most assertive offspring yet, AOK.
The introduction of AOK was something of an accident. On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard made the first American flight into space. It was a suborbital flight, to be sure, lasting all of fifteen minutes and reaching an altitude of only 116 miles, but it was a perfect flight and a national triumph. And it was broadcast on live television.
Shepard himself didn’t use AOK. In his communications with mission control, Shepard first used go : “Fuel is go. Oxygen is go. All systems are go.” Then he switched to plain OK: “Pitch is OK. Yaw is OK. Roll is OK.” And later, just “OK, OK, OK.” “Oxygen is still OK.” Finally, it was good : “Main chute is good.”
Meanwhile, however, back on earth, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency introduced AOK to the public. Apparently the engineering staffat NASA had been prefixing OK with A to make sure it would be understood amid radio static. NASA public affairs officer John “Shorty” Powers told reporters that Shepard had said e
verything was AOK, and the term immediately caught on. As Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, “‘A-Okay’ became shorthand for Shepard’s triumph over the odds and for astronaut coolness under stress.”
And as befits its ubiquity, OK was present in the first human conversation on the moon. Indeed, it was the very first word spoken after the lunar module landed on July 20, 1969. Eric Jones’s careful transcription of the conversation between Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the lunar module, landing on the moon, and with Charles Duke, the voice of mission control back on Earth, goes as follows:
A ldrin: Contact light. [A probe beneath the lunar module makes contact with the surface.]
A rmstrong: Shutdown. [And with engines off, the module settles down.]
A ldrin: OK. Engine stop.
The astronauts continue with technical details:
A ldrin: ACA out of detent.
A rmstrong: Out of detent. Auto.
A ldrin: Mode control, both auto. Descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off. 413 is in.
Duke: We copy you down, Eagle.
A rmstrong: Engine arm is off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
D uke: Roger, Twan … Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.
A ldrin: Thank you.
D uke: You’re looking good here.
And the conversation resumes with more OKs:
A rmstrong: OK. (To Aldrin) Let’s get on with it. (To Houston) OK. We’re going to be busy for a minute.
And then, toward the end of the twentieth century, came the personal computer, with OK hitching a ride. Nowadays any computer or cell phone, and practically any device connected to the Internet, will offer choices with the “OK button.” It seems natural now, but that wasn’t the first thought of the software engineers who pioneered interactive computing.
It was the early 1980s and Apple’s engineers were developing the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, the Lisa, using the now nearly universal mouse-guided system. With the new point-and-click technique, the question arose: when you click, what do you point at?
According to the story recounted by Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the Lisa applications team, it was manager Larry Tesler who insisted on testing the software with real users. The feedback from that testing resulted in the OK button.
The developers first offered users a choice between “Do It” and “Cancel.” But when they tested those options, they discovered that “Do It” puzzled some users. One complained, “Why is the computer calling me a dolt?” The problem was solved when OK took the place of “Do It.”
Hertzfeld says that the developers had avoided OK “because we thought it was too colloquial.” But OK has many advantages. It is short, easy to recognize with its unique and distinctive combination of O and K, universally understood, and perfectly suited to a situation where you might be more or less enthusiastic but still want to do it. No wonder it caught on. And though nowadays you will sometimes click “Select” or “Approve” or “Agree” or “Enter,” OK remains the most likely to appear in a dialogue box.
Bill DeRouchey, on his website Push. Click. Touch, offers this paean to the OK button:
All interaction with technology is a conversation. You ask a device to do something. It responds with a question or some choices. In most situations, your simplest response is to simply say OK. The OK button is the handshake. You and the device have worked together to a mutual agreement. “Do you want to save this phone number?” OK. “Do you want to print your document two-sided?” OK.
It’s the one button that requires nearly no translation. Luckily, it’s also one of the most compact words available. OK. Two letters that will fit on any button. OK is not just a word anymore. It’s an icon. A wordicon.…
Select and Enter are commands to machines. OK is a conversation with your friend, technology.
OK? OK.
In a follow-up comment, DeRouchey adds:
OK is acquiescing to the machine, forming a partnership.… It changed the relationship between person and computer, away from the master and slave mentality toward a friendlier world where the computer is a partner.
I’m not sure we’re there yet.
14
THE WORLD—AND ENGLAND
NOWADAYS OK HAS SPREAD TO NUMEROUS LANGUAGES THROUGH- out the world. From pole to pole, from the precincts of Paris to the homes of Hong Kong, from the plains of Serengeti to the steppes of Siberia, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the top of Mount Everest, wherever humans discourse in whatever language, it may well be punctuated with OK.
Speakers of Dutch, German, Swedish, Polish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, Welsh, Hebrew, Korean, and Japanese, among many others, say OK, with pronunciations adapted to their languages. Hebrew is a typical example. From Ashley Crandall’s blog about her trip to Israel:
The most important thing that came out of that trip is we figured out how to say “okay” in Hebrew.… In Hebrew it would go something like chet, o vowel, kaf, yud with this other vowel that when combined make an “a” sound. Make sure the sound of the chhhh comes from the back of your mouth and is obnoxiously overdone. People that speak German and Scandinavian do very well with this sound. Spanish speakers come very close to the right sound as long as their English isn’t too good and they still mispronounce words that start with an “h” like hotdog … try chhhotdog.
In Hebrew, as in many other languages, OK coexists with native terminology. As Ari Kernerman of Kernerman Publishing in Tel Aviv explains:
The Hebrew word that OK has replaced is b’seder. Seder is “order,” and b’seder is “in order.” So b’seder could be translated as “alright.” But OK is now more common than b’seder.
To Americans, OK is OK. Although it is central to our way of life, to us it conjures up nothing special, because it is so natural, so much a part of our daily dealings. Despite its odd and obtrusive spelling, we take it for granted.
Not always the rest of the world. From the nineteenth century to the present day, as an export to other countries and languages, OK has carried with it a distinctively American aura. It has embodied something special—sometimes American simplicity, pragmatism, and optimism, and at other times a certain glamour.
That must have been in the minds of a young couple from Holland who rated the Hotel Charles in Budapest as a “very okay 3 star hotel!” Or the editors of a Russian humor and satire magazine, published in the United States, who decided to call it Okay! Or for that matter, the editors of a British celebrity weekly named OK! that has recently had success with an American edition.
OK! had an awkward launch in America in 2005, partly because Americans were puzzled by the title. Its American rivals are named People, Us Weekly, Star, National Enquirer, InTouch —nothing even remotely resembling OK. Interviewed in 2007 for the Sunday Times of London, New York editor Sarah Ivens said that American advertisers didn’t understand the title. And why should they? As we have seen, OK hasn’t done much to sell a product. It wasn’t the title but the revamping of the magazine to feature American celebrities that has made OK! a success.
The rest of the world had no such trouble with the title. OK! magazine has helped spread OK around the world, with editions in twenty countries and a weekly total circulation of some thirty million.
But then the British have always been a bit batty about OK. For them, at least at first, OK was a swell import—quite literally swell. It was popularized as a “swell” expression in England around 1870 in a music hall song by Alfred Vance, “The Great Vance.” He and other music hall performers of the day, known as “Lions Comique,” took on the air and appearance of a London “swell,” a dandy dressed in the latest fashions and imagining himself to be a ladies’ man. In the final chorus of his famous song, “Walking in the Zoo,” Vance assures the audience he is “as great a swell as ever.” His performances of this song apparently deserve credit for popularizing not onl
y OK but also the abbreviation “Zoo” for “Zoological Society’s Gardens.” The song also uses the newly introduced Americanism skedaddle .
In the sheet music for “Walking in the Zoo,” OK appears with commas rather than periods after each of the letters, apparently because its use was so unfamiliar to the author, Hugh Willoughby Sweny, and the publisher.
Cover of Sheet Music for “Walking in the Zoo,”
1871 BRITISH LIBRARY ONLINE GALLERY.
1. The Stilton, sir, the cheese, the O, K, thing to do,
On Sunday afternoon, is to toddle in the Zoo,
Weekdays may do for “Cads,” but not for me and you,
So dress’d right down the road, we show them who is who.
Chorus.
The Walking in the Zoo, Walking in the Zoo,
The O, K, thing on Sunday is the walking in the Zoo,
Walking in the Zoo, Walking in the Zoo,
The O, K, thing on Sunday is the walking in the Zoo.
2. So when there came to Town, my pretty cousin Loo,
I took her off to spend a Sunday at the Zoo,
I show’d her the aquarium, the Tiger, the Zebu,
The Eliphant [sic ], the Eland, that cuss the Kangaroo.
Chorus.
That Sunday in the Zoo, That Sunday in the Zoo,
It’s jolly with a pretty girl walking in the Zoo
Walking in the Zoo, Walking in the Zoo,
The O, K, thing on Sunday is the walking in the Zoo.
3. I show’d her the swell-es-ses, and all the fashions new
Girls with golden tresses, girls with black hair too.
Walnut gives the black, Champagne the golden hue
All the beautiful forever that Madame Rachel knew.
Chorus.
Oh! The Walking in the Zoo, Walking in the Zoo,
The monkeys put us to the blush on Sunday at the Zoo.
Walking in the Zoo, Walking in the Zoo,
The O, K, thing on Sunday is the walking in the Zoo.
4. So in the monkey house our going in to woo,
Piling up the agony, swearing to be true,
Agony indeed! for the cheerful Cockatoo.
OK Page 14