OK

by Metcalf, Allan;

  Rudely caught my ear a nip and bit it through and through.

  Chorus.

  Oh! that cheerful Cockatoo, That awful Cockatoo

  The horror and the agony that Sunday at the Zoo.

  Walking in the Zoo, Walking in the Zoo,

  The O, K, thing on Sunday is the walking in the Zoo.

  5. My cousin bolted off without any more ado,

  And I skedaddled also looking very blue,

  So sympathizing friends I bid you all adieu.

  Don’t mention this occurrence if you meet me at the Zoo,

  Chorus.

  If you meet me at the Zoo, You meet me at the Zoo,

  I’m as great a swell as ever 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.

  (The zoological gardens in Regent’s Park were open to the public on weekdays, but only members of the Zoological Society could enter on Sunday, hence the swell superiority of that day. Stilton is of course a famous blue cheese. Madame Rachel was famous for her prominently advertised book Beautiful for Ever, “on Female Grace and Beauty.” She also sold many beauty products, such as a “Magnetic Rock Dew Water of Sahara, for removing Wrinkles.”)

  “Walking in the Zoo” has had a modest revival in the present day. In 2004 a song “The OK Thing to Do on Sunday Afternoon Is to Toddle in the Zoo” was released in an album of that name by the duo known as My Little Airport, described as a “Hong Kong– based indie pop band.” To be sure, the Chinese words of the song make only a glancing reference to the zoo in recalling a lost relationship:

  Your photo is kept with a love letter, each day I see it once again.

  The zoo we strolled 2 years ago, till now where did we go?

  I did wrote about you everyday in my diary, but to give up

  on you is a hopeless dream, Just like a dull solo.…

  The Slang Dictionary, Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal, published in London in 1874, about the same time as “Walking in the Zoo,” reflects this positive British view of OK as well as the standard story about President Jackson (or at least “an official”) marking OK on documents:

  O. K., a matter to be o. k. (oll korrect, i.e., all correct), must be on the “square,” and perfectly in order. This is an Americanism, and is derived from the initials o. k., said to have been marked on a document by an official to signify that all was right and proper.

  Another British attitude toward OK is demonstrated in the movie Gosford Park . It’s a twenty-first-century movie, released in 2001, but it presumes to depict life at an English country house in 1932. OK occurs two times in the script, which was written by an Englishman, Julian Fellowes. In one of the opening scenes, traveling to Gosford Park, Constance, Countess of Trentham, is frustrated in her attempt to have the top of her motorcar removed. An American movie producer who is also going to Gosford Park pulls up. Seeing her frustration, he asks: “Hello. Is everything all right? Are—are you OK?”

  Apparently puzzled by the expression, Lady Trentham replies, “Am I what?”

  So Lady Trentham’s lady’s maid, Mary Maceachran, translates: “We’re all right, thank you.”

  The implication is that OK is either unknown to Lady Trentham or, more likely, an Americanism not suitable for cultivated speech. Still, it is clear that Mary has no trouble understanding it, and OK comes up later when she is talking with another servant about Sir William McCordle and his wife, Lady Sylvia, who preside over Gosford Park. Mary asks, “What’s she like to work for?” and Elsie, the head housemaid at Gosford Park, replies, “She’s horrible. But he’s—he’s OK.”

  One of the oddest uses for OK in the UK emerged apparently in the 1930s, apparently in Glasgow. Urbandictionary.com explains it this way:

  The phrase’s first recorded use was in 1975, but it is rumored to have originated as early as the 1930’s among the Glasgow “Razor Gangs.” Rival gangs were known to tag each other’s turf with “(gang name) Rules, Ok?” during disputes over territory as a part of gang warfare.

  Examples offered by Urbandictionary.com are Dandys Rule, OK? and KC RULES OK . “Brian from Shawnee” posted on the Phrase Finder website in 2004:

  My suggestion is from UK urban gang “turf” rivalries and flick knife wars of the 1950s where the practice was to mark your gang’s territory with slogans painted on buildings with phrases like: “Red Blades rule OK?” Serious stuffin those days.

  Whatever the origin—the earliest published evidence is from the 1970s—nowadays rules OK continues to be used in Britain, and it has gone proper, often with tongue in cheek. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes the Sunday Express from 1976: “And when he left the train … he gave … a look which said . . ‘First Class Rules—O.K.?’” And The Times from 1981: “It is a case of the tobacco industry rules, OK.”

  The Stray Cats, an American rockabilly band, wrote the song “Rockabilly Rules OK” after they moved to England in the 1980s. Here are some of the lyrics from their 1989 album Blast Off :

  We’re naming this song rockabilly rules OK.

  Well rockabilly rules OK.

  Rockabilly’s cool. Oh yeah.

  Rockabilly rocks. Let’s bop.

  Well rockabilly billy bop. Let’s bop.

  There’s a children’s book, Titus Rules OK, published in 2002 and written by Dick King-Smith (an Englishman, of course—a former farmer from Gloucestershire). Titus is the Queen’s dog, a corgi. He learns from his mother how to rule:

  “The Queen, you see, may be responsible for the welfare not just of her family but of all the citizens of the United Kingdom and her realms overseas. But, in her eyes, it is our welfare that is at the top of her priorities and most important to her. She is our servant.”

  “Gosh!” said Titus. “D’you mean she’ll do whatever we tell her to?”

  “Certainly,” said his mother.

  “If I told her to do something, she’d do it, would she, Mum?”

  “If you told her in the right way.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Politely. Her Majesty does not like being barked at or yapped at. You’ll have noticed that just now, when she dished out the biscuits, we all kept as quiet as mice. Any time you want a biscuit, just go and sit quite silently in front of the Queen and gaze up into her eyes with a pleading look.”

  At the end, Titus has become so much the Queen’s favorite that he gets to sleep with her. And the Queen herself late at night spray-paints in gold on the wall of the courtyard, “Titus Rules OK.”

  One of the best-known uses of OK in the UK was by the Monty Python comedy troupe in their “Lumberjack Song,” first presented on television in December 1969. A man reveals his daydream of being a lumberjack in Canada with these words:

  I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK,

  I sleep all night and I work all day.

  I cut down trees, I eat my lunch,

  I go to the lavatory.

  On Wednesdays I go shopping

  And have buttered scones for tea.

  He continues in this vein, as a girlfriend and a chorus of Canadian Mounties echo his words. “He’s a lumberjack and he’s OK,” they declare, less and less enthusiastically as he describes his other activities, until they turn away in disgust:

  I put on women’s clothing,

  And hang around in bars.…

  I cut down trees, I wear high heels,

  Suspendies and a bra.

  I wish I’d been a girlie,

  Just like my dear pappa.

  One final British example is Oakie Doke, originally a cartoon series in stop-motion animation for the BBC in 1995–96.

  If you have a problem and you need a helping hand,

  Cross the dell and ring the bell—he’ll understand.

  Don’t worry, ’cos here comes Mr. Doke,

  The friendliest of folk is Mr. Oakie Doke.

  And who exactly is Mr. Oakie Doke? The website Toonhound explains:

&nb
sp; Oakie Doke is a jolly helpful woodland chap—a wisp, a forest spirit or sprite—garbed in oak leaves with twig limbs, leafy ears and an acorn crowned head. Oakie dwells in a splendid hollowed oak tree house with a terrific helter-skelter built around the outside upon which rides every episode, down to meet his forest friends.

  Okey-dokey? Well, that’s not the end of it. As the next chapter will explain, OK found its way into a very British exposition of a way of life.

  15

  THE LIFEMANSHIP OK

  CONSIDERING THE PECULIAR USES TO WHICH THE ENGLISH HAVE put OK, it is perhaps not so surprising that a British wag was the first to hit upon a way to use OK in the service of expounding a way of life—a philosophy, if you will.

  Throughout its history, OK has remained conspicuously absent from philosophy. Two letters born of a joke and used for practical purposes hardly make for a view of life or a way of life. Indeed, to this day serious philosophical discourse, like all formal discourse, generally avoids using OK at all. But OK plays a significant supporting role in the pseudo-serious practical philosophy known as Lifemanship.

  Lifemanship was explained in a work of deadpan British humor: Some Notes on Lifemanship, a 1950 book by Stephen Potter. This was a sequel to his 1947 The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or, The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating. Gamesmanship was about winning in sports; Lifemanship extended that method to all of life.

  Both books expound a strategy encapsulated in the title of his 1955 book One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and Teaching of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of Oneupness and Gameslifemastery, where he offers advice on “how to be one up—how to make the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly.”

  One tactic for one-upping, Potter says in Lifemanship, is to use what he calls “O.K.-words” and “O.K.-names” in conversation:

  NOTE ON O.K.-WORDS.

  My use of the word “diathesis” reminds me that this is now on the O.K. list for conversationmen. We hope to publish, monthly, a list of words which may be brought up at any point in the conversation and used with effect because no one quite understands what they mean, albeit these words have been in use for a sufficiently long time, at any rate by Highbrowmen, say ten years, for our audience to have seen them once or twice and already felt uneasy about them. We are glad to suggest two words for November:Mystique, Classique.

  In a later chapter on Writership, instructing a literary critic how to “be on top of, or better than, the person criticised,” Potter declares, “The absolute O.K.-ness of French literature, particularly modern French, and indeed of France generally, cannot be too much emphasized.” And he adds, “Just as there are O.K.-words in conversationship, so there are O.K.- people to mention in Newstatesmanship. Easily the most O.K. for 1945–50 are Rilke and Kafka. It is believed that they will still be absolutely O.K. for another five years, in fact it is doubtful if there have been any more O.K.-names in recent times.” In a footnote he lists

  types of authors who are not O.K.-names whom it is O.K. to pitch into. It is all right to pitch into:

  Any author who has written a book about dogs.

  Any author who has written a book on natural history, illustrated with woodcuts.

  Any author who has written a life of Napoleon, Byron, or Dr. Johnson, without footnotes or bibliography.

  Any author of a life of anybody not yet dead.

  Any author of a book on Sussex.

  Any author of a book of unrhymed and irregular verse in the style of 1923.

  Any author of a book of thoughtful open-air poems in the style of 1916.

  Every sentence of his books is written with tongue in cheek. His use of OK in a pseudo-philosophical treatise only adds to its irony. And yet it is possible to see a common thread, accidental or otherwise, leading to the next and completely serious use of OK as a view of the world.

  16

  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL OK

  LIFEMANSHIP WAS A SATIRICAL BOOK ABOUT PLAYING THE GAME OF life. The psychiatrist Eric Berne, however, took the idea of games seriously, inadvertently starting a process that has led to what could be called the American philosophy of the twenty-first century. It helped transform Americans from xenophobes to xenophiles.

  The story of the mind-altering development of OK begins like this: In the 1950s Dr. Eric Berne, a psychiatrist living in the trendy artistic community of Carmel, California, led a revolution in psychology, or at least a minor uprising. Instead of concentrating on therapy for the individual, he diverted attention to interactions between individuals. He called his innovation transactional analysis.

  For several years after the 1958 publication of his paper on the new approach and the 1961 publication of his book Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, TA was little known beyond the community of his professional colleagues. But it became a public sensation in 1964 with the book Games People Play. The subtitle modestly declared its scope: The Psychology of Human Relationships.

  That plain, clear, and yet enticing title is one reason why the book soon became a national best seller. The other was that it was just as plain and clear on the inside. Freud had postulated the id, the ego, and the superego. Jung delved into analytical psychology, archetypes, animus, and anima. But you didn’t have to be an expert to understand Berne’s simpler explanation of states of mind and how they predispose people to play games with each other.

  Berne says that everyone’s personality contains three “ego states,” named simply Parent, Adult, and Child. The Parent implanted itself in our minds from what our parents said or did while we were growing up. In the Parent mode, we ourselves act as parents, issuing instructions, criticisms, and occasionally compliments as we remember our parents (or parental substitutes) doing during our childhood.

  The Child is the way we remember our own feelings in response to what our parents said or did while we were growing up. In the Child mode, we act like children, frequently feeling helpless, guilty, and inadequate.

  In contrast with both the Parent and the Child, who act based on subjective memories from the past, is the Adult. The Adult is the grown-up, making decisions based not on childhood feelings but on objective analysis of the current situation.

  At any particular moment, as we interact with others, we are in one of those three states. When we are in the Parent mode, we feel superior to others and tell them what to do. When we are in the Child mode, we feel inadequate and helpless, or sometimes playful. And when people interact Parent to Child, Parent to Parent, or Child to Child, instead of Adult to Adult, there are problems. In the Parent or Child modes, people play games that can repeat themselves endlessly without a satisfactory resolution.

  Take the game Berne called “Why Don’t You—Yes But,” whose dynamic is clear from the title. It is played by one or more people taking the Parental role, offering advice on a particular problem, and one person taking the role of a helpless Child, coming up with reasons for being unable to accept any of the advice. From the Child’s point of view, the goal of the game is not to solve the problem—that would happen Adult to Adult—but to comfortably confirm that the problem will persist and the Child can continue to complain about it.

  Or there is “If It Weren’t for You,” played between husband and wife. One spouse, let’s say the husband, is domineering and prohibits the other from going out or taking risks. The wife complains but is secretly gratified; she has chosen a domineering spouse in order to be prevented from doing things she fears, while having the opportunity to complain. The domineering spouse plays the Parent and the subordinate spouse the Child. Secretly, though, the domineering spouse is a Child too, afraid of being deserted. So says Dr. Berne.

  Such games get us nowhere and are doomed to endless repetition, Berne says. So he provides antidotes, bringing in the Adult to break up the game. In “Why Don’t You—Yes But,” for example, the people giving advice can break out of the closed loop by saying, “That is a difficult problem. What are you going to
do about it?” In “If It Weren’t for You,” the domineering spouse can end the game simply by saying, “Go ahead and do it.”

  Berne explains that the Adult within us allows us to look at situations not as prisoners of the past, governed by childish anxieties and parental strictures, but as free agents, free to interact in a healthy way in the present. Through Transactional Analysis, people can learn to recognize the unhealthy games they play with family and friends and learn to escape them. But then, of course, the participants are no longer in the comfort of a familiar game. And Berne is pessimistic: he worries that most people are too comfortable with their games to want to change.

  “Why Don’t You—Yes But” and “If It Weren’t for You” are the first two games Berne studied. His book includes a hundred games, with similar self-explanatory titles. Most are destructive, played Child to Parent, Child to Child, or Parent to Parent. There are Life Games like “Alcoholic,” “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch,” and “See What You Made Me Do.” There are Marital Games like “If It Weren’t for You,” “Look How Hard I’ve Tried,” and (said ironically) “Sweetheart.” Party Games include “Ain’t It Awful” and “Schlemiel.” Sexual Games include “Let’s You and Him Fight.” As for Consulting Room Games, Berne draws on his professional experience to describe “I’m Only Trying to Help You,” “Stupid,” and five more.

  All these are patterns of interaction performed by people who are usually unaware they are playing these games. Transactional Analysis aims to bring these patterns to the attention of the players so that they can end harmful games and replace them with good games like “Happy to Help,” “Homely Sage,” and “They’ll Be Glad They Knew Me.”

  Nearly half a century after its publication, the insights of Games People Play remain pertinent and persuasive today, and their presentation remains engaging. No wonder the book has sold more than five million copies since its initial press run of just three thousand.

  OK. So what does any of this have to do with OK? Nothing, so far. OK (spelled in its less conspicuous form okay) makes just two very minor appearances in Games People Play. Once it is part of one line in an eight-line greeting ritual: “‘Well, take cara yourself.’ (Okay.)” The other time it is in a bit of dialogue illustrating an antidote to the game “Schlemiel”: “It’s okay, tonight you can embarrass my wife, ruin the furniture and wreck the rug, but please don’t say ‘I’m sorry.’” Neither of these trivial uses of OK would make Berne’s book a candidate for mention here. But it is important because it led to another, even more popular book on transactional analysis, one that chose OK as its focus and in so doing, gave new meaning and influence to OK.