On the day,
23 rd in 1839, the initials "O.K." are first published in The Boston
Morning Post. Meant as an abbreviation for "oll correct," a popular
slang misspelling of "all correct" at the time, OK steadily made its
way into the everyday speech of Americans.
During the
late 1830s, it was a favorite practice among younger, educated circles to
misspell words intentionally, then abbreviate them and use them as slang when
talking to one another. Just as teenagers today have their own slang based on
distortions of common words, such as "kewl" for "cool" or
"DZ" for "these," the "in crowd" of the 1830s had
a whole host of slang terms they abbreviated. Popular abbreviations included
"KY" for "No use" ("know yuse"), "KG"
for "No go" ("Know go"), and "OW" for all right
("oll wright").
Of all the
abbreviations used during that time, OK was propelled into the limelight when
it was printed in the Boston Morning Post as part of a joke. Its popularity
exploded when it was picked up by contemporary politicians. When the incumbent
president Martin Van Buren was up for reelection, his Democratic supporters
organized a band of thugs to influence voters. This group was formally called
the "O.K. Club," which referred both to Van Buren's nickname
"Old Kinderhook" (based on his hometown of Kinderhook, New York), and
to the term recently made popular in the papers. At the same time, the opposing
Whig Party made use of "OK" to denigrate Van Buren's political
mentorAndrew Jackson. According to the Whigs, Jackson invented the abbreviation
"OK" to cover up his own misspelling of "all correct."
The man
responsible for unraveling the mystery behind "OK" was an American
linguist named Allen Walker Read. An English professor at Columbia University,
Read dispelled a host of erroneous theories on the origins of "OK,"
ranging from the name of a popular Army biscuit (Orrin Kendall) to the name of
a Haitian port famed for its rum (Aux Cayes) to the signature of a Choctaw
chief named Old Keokuk. Whatever its origins, "OK" has become one of
the most ubiquitous terms in the world, and certainly one of America's greatest
lingual exports.
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