OK Read online

  OK

  OK

  THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF

  AMERICA’S GREATEST WORD

  Allan Metcalf

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  Copyright © 2011 by Allan Metcalf

  Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Metcalf, Allan A.

  OK : the improbable story of America’s greatest word/

  Allan Metcalf.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-537793-4

  1. English language—United States—Etymology.

  2. United States—History—Terminology.

  3. English language—Usage. 4. Americanisms. I. Title.

  PE2831.M48 2010

  427’.973—dc21

  2010009709

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  To the memory of

  Allen Walker Read

  who rules OK

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. Introduction: The ABCs of OK

  2. A Saturday Morning in Boston

  3. 1840: Old Kinderhook Is OK

  4. Hoax: Andrew Jackson’s Misspelling

  5. Aesthetics: The Look and Sound of OK

  6. False Origins

  7. The Business of OK

  8. O.K. Clubs.

  9. The Literary OK

  10. Oklahoma Is OK

  11. Okey-Dokey

  12. Modern OK Literature

  13. The Practical OK

  14. The World—and England

  15. The Lifemanship OK

  16. The Psychological OK

  17. The American Philosophy

  Index

  PREFACE

  OK. WHY THIS BOOK? STRANGELY ENOUGH, EVEN THOUGH OK is by far the most successful American creation in language, as well as nearly the strangest, it hasn’t had a book of its own. So here it is.

  And it is made possible, above all, by Allen Walker Read (1906–2002), professor at Columbia University, scholar without equal of American English. Before he came along, a century of speculation, obfuscation, and deliberate deception had obscured the origin of OK seemingly beyond recovery. In the absence of any clear evidence and the presence of false rumors, learned lexicographers as well as ordinary citizens were free to imagine the beginnings of OK in sources as disparate as the Choctaw Indian language, Otto Kimmel’s biscuits, and supposed misspelling by President Andrew Jackson. All plausible, in their way, but as Read would demonstrate, O.R. (all wrong).

  His name was apt, because Read read voluminously in the books, magazines, and newspapers of early America. He did this as a staff member of the four-volume scholarly Dictionary of American English (1938–44) but also on his own throughout his life. So it was not surprising that Read was the one who discovered, in fine print on page 2 of the Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, an instance of OK that turned out to be the earliest on record. Nobody else but Read would have been combing through that newspaper looking for words, and nobody else but Read had read widely enough in the newspapers of that day to be sure that this was the first instance.

  When he published his findings in a series of articles in the journal American Speech back in 1963–64, he didn’t offer just that one citation. To prove his point beyond dispute, he provided literally hundreds of quotations from newspapers of the 1830s and 1840s, showing not only the context of joking abbreviations and misspelling that made OK possible in the first place but also the growth and development of OK as it was adapted in the presidential election of 1840 for “Old Kinderhook,” Martin Van Buren, and for many subsequent purposes.

  Since the publication of his articles, there have been occasional challenges to Read’s evidence of the origin of OK in that Boston newspaper. All have failed to earn support, however, because they rest either entirely on speculation or on isolated instances of something written earlier. As for speculation, it’s easy to find native expressions in other languages that sound like OK—that’s one reason why the American OK has spread so widely through the languages of the world. But speculation needs evidence to back it, and so far none has been found. As for the earlier isolated instances, some have turned out to be misreadings, while others—well, there’s not a shred of evidence showing that one night’s watchword from the American Revolution was somehow connected with a Boston joke half a century later.

  My chapters on the first few years of OK necessarily lean heavily on Read’s evidence. Those who have seen his articles in American Speech or their reprint in his Milestones in the History of English in America (edited by Richard W. Bailey, Publication of the American Dialect Society 86, Duke University Press, 2002) will recognize much that is familiar here. The additional matter in my chapters only further confirms his conclusions.

  In the half century since Read’s articles, much more has been discovered about the later life of OK as it developed from joke to business tool and then to staple of everyday conversation and an attitude toward life. A wealth of new material is available, unimaginable in the paper world of fifty years ago. Internet, take a bow.

  I have tried to be as generous as Read in providing examples to illustrate the development of OK. The vast majority of examples come from the Internet, many of them in historical document databases such as Making of America, a digital collection of nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, and books. Mining the data for examples of OK is still hard work; there is much fool’s gold in the false positives dredged up from old publications by automatic OCR. Nevertheless, searching the Internet for OK locates many needles in acres of haystacks, allowing for a fulllength portrait that begins to do justice to this incomparable expression.

  You won’t find footnotes in this book. The Internet changes too fast for that. Instead, I have tried to acknowledge sources in sufficient detail that you can locate them too by Googling, with a little luck. In those places in my book I have named the numerous people who, wittingly or un-, have contributed to this portrait of OK.

  But in addition, let me here note my gratitude for help in ways beyond those noted in the text from researchers Erin McKean, Richard W. Bailey, Barry Popik, Joseph Pickett, and James Davis; at MacMurray College from Colleen Hester, Alice Dodson, Malea Harney, Linda Duncan, Nadine Szczepanski, Dan Currier, Susan Eilering, and DeeAnn Roome; and elsewhere from Fr. Kip Ashmore, Sara Metcalf, Ginger Lane, Elizabeth Schneewind, Jennifer Choi, and Louise DeCosta Wides. At Oxford University Press I had essential assistance from Peter Ohlin, Brian Hurley, Lucy Randall, Woody Gilmartin, Joellyn Ausanka, and Betsy DeJesu. And I must reserve my last word of thanks for my wife, Donna, who is way beyond OK.

  OK? Let’s begin.


  OK

  1

  INTRODUCTION

  THE ABCS OF OK

  IT IS SAID TO BE THE MOST FREQUENTLY SPOKEN (OR TYPED) word on the planet, bigger even than an infant’s first word ma or the ubiquitous Coke. And it was the first word spoken on the moon.

  It’s America’s answer to Shakespeare.

  It’s an entire philosophy expressed in two letters.

  It’s very odd, but it’s … OK.

  Yes, OK. Just two simple letters. And two letters of humble origin; they were born as a lame joke perpetrated by a newspaper editor in 1839. But these two simple letters (or four, if you use its genteel alter ego okay) anchor our agreements, confirm our understandings, and choreograph the dance of everyday life.

  This is a book about OK. And OK truly deserves a book of its own, not only because it is different from anything else in our language but because it is so important. OK is a meme that has burrowed deeply into the way we think and act. In fact, those two letters encapsulate a whole view of life—the American philosophy, if two letters can be said to embody a philosophy, and if Americans can be said to have one.

  Yet we scarcely notice. OK seems too simple, too trivial, and above all too familiar to attract notice to itself. It scarcely makes an appearance in books of famous quotations. Here, in fact, is the complete Book of Famous OK Quotations:

  I’m OK—You’re OK

  —Title of book on transactional analysis (1967) by Thomas A. Harris, M.D.

  That’s it? Yes, to capture all the famous quotations involving love or war would take many pages. But the collection of famous quotations involving OK contains all of one item.

  Wait a minute, you might say. What about Todd Beamer’s famous “OK, let’s roll!” to begin the attack on the terrorists who hijacked United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001? The full quotation was “Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll!” But even in that statement, the OK was inconspicuous. On the T-shirts and other memorabilia that soon were produced in his honor, only the last two words were reproduced. His wife Lisa’s book honoring him likewise omitted OK from its title: Let’s Roll! Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage. As Time magazine summarized in December 2001, “Many diverse Americans have latched onto his phrase ‘Let’s roll’ to symbolize that strength of character.” But not OK.

  It’s everywhere, but hardly noticed. In the November 23, 2009, issue of the New Yorker you will find a cartoon whose caption begins and ends with OK. Two waiters are standing in an entranceway looking at a woman at a distant table, and one says to the other, “O.K., her mouth is full—run over and ask her if everything is O.K.” Amusing, but not because of OK. And there’s no indication that the joke was making any kind of play on the two different meanings of OK that it employs.

  No Bananas

  Another missed opportunity for a famous OK quotation came when Frank Silver and Irving Cohn wrote one of the best-known songs of the twentieth century. In an alternate universe, maybe, their lyrics would go like this:

  There’s a fruit store on our street.

  It’s run by a Greek.

  And he keeps good things to eat,

  But you should hear him speak.

  When you ask him anything,

  Never answers no.

  He just OKs you to death,

  And as he take your dough, he tells you:

  “OK! We have no bananas. We have no bananas today.…”

  But in our universe, because of the unassuming nature of OK, Silver and Cohn instead chose a different word for their 1923 hit, and the quotation books have only “Yes! We have no bananas.”

  Important, yet inconspicuous. That is just one of the oddities of the world’s best-known word.

  This book will explore the mystery of OK: its odd origin, its unlikely survival, its varied forms and meanings, and its pervasive influence. OK is the most amazing invention in the history of American English.

  The Everyday OK

  It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the modern world runs on OK (or plain lowercase k, if you are texting). We write those letters on documents to mark our approval. We speak them to express assent, or just to say we’re listening. We accept a computer’s actions by clicking on OK. And we also use OK to introduce matters of importance, or recall an audience’s wandering attention.

  Those are the simple obvious uses for OK, the ones we know well. In those situations, what a good friend OK is! A handy tool. An uncomplaining workhorse. Indeed, in America in the twenty-first century, it’s hard to get through a conversation without a plentiful sprinkling of OK. It’s the easiest way to signal agreement, whether with a written OK on a document or an OK spoken aloud:

  OK, I’ll go with you.

  OK, you win.

  At the start of a sentence, OK can also be a wakeup call, an alert, an attention getter, an announcement that something new is coming:

  OK, I’ll only say this once.

  OK, I get it.

  OK, let’s start making our pinhole camera!

  Blue Jeans, Shakespeare, and Light

  To begin to grasp the full import of the phenomenon that is OK, we need to step back and consider it from fresh perspectives. When we do, we find that OK is like blue jeans, Shakespeare, and light.

  Blue Jeans

  OK is as American as jeans. In fact, it’s very much like them. Nearly everyone uses both OK and jeans for everyday purposes, but not on formal occasions. And they are both American inventions of the nineteenth century that have spread to the far corners of the globe.

  America’s Shakespeare

  Less obviously, OK is also America’s answer to Shakespeare. Or more precisely, OK is America’s Shakespeare, a two-letter expression as potent (though perhaps not as poetic) as anything in the Bard’s works. Like Shakespeare, OK is protean, pervasive, influential, and successful in its own day and in ours. But the similarity goes deeper.

  Like Shakespeare, OK had humble origins. This has set some critics on edge, prompting them to deny the attested origins in favor of more dignified ones.

  For Shakespeare, the anti-Stratfordians reason that the “poacher from Stratford,” a commoner, could not have written the noble language of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. No, those works of genius must have come from a nobleman like the Earl of Oxford, a scholar like Francis Bacon, a college-educated playwright like Christopher Marlowe (whose death in 1593 must have been faked), or royalty—maybe Queen Elizabeth.

  Similarly, for OK, elitists find it beyond embarrassing to think that OK began as a joke misspelling for “all correct.” Surely, they reason, an expression as serious and important as OK must have come from a more serious abbreviation, like “Old Kinderhook” for presidential candidate Martin Van Buren in the 1840 election. Or maybe it came from baker Otto Kimmel’s supposed custom of imprinting his initials in vanilla cookies. Or wait—maybe it was borrowed from another language, like Choctaw, Scottish, Greek, or Mandingo.

  All very tempting, but overwhelming evidence shows otherwise.

  Another thing OK and Shakespeare have in common is elusiveness. How do you properly spell OK? And is it a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or interjection? Indeed, is it a word at all, an abbreviation, or something else? There are no simple answers to these questions.

  Similarly, the text of Shakespeare’s plays can’t be pinned down. The quarto and folio versions of the plays published during or shortly after Shakespeare’s lifetime have significant differences, and it is hard to imagine the full text of either quarto or folio being spoken quickly enough to fit the “two hours traffic” stated in the prologue to Romeo and Juliet.

  Light

  And light! Yes, OK is like light, in our post-Einsteinian understanding of that pervasive phenomenon. Before Einstein, physicists were puzzled: light sometimes appears to be a particle, sometimes a wave. Is light a wave or particle? Einstein’s answer was “Yes, it’s either, or both.” That’s the answer we have to give to the OK phenomenon. Is it a word or an abbreviation? Is it
noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, or all of the above? The answer has to be “Yes, it’s either, or both, or all.” It’s an old-fashioned joke with a postmodern punch line.

  So it will take a village of chapters to approach the heart of the mystery of OK.

  The Many Spellings of OK

  The elusiveness of OK begins with its first impression, its look on the page. OK has not one but many spellings. That’s odd, when you think about it. Most words have just one acceptable spelling, though they may have varying pronunciation. OK, on the other hand, has just one pronunciation, the names of the letters O and K. Since it just consists of those two letters of the alphabet, why shouldn’t there be just one spelling?

  Well, it turns out that there are different ways to spell those two letters, and there is no consensus on which is the best. It can be OK in capital letters or ok in small. Either of those versions can be served plain or peppered with periods (O.K., o.k.), so those two letters make four more possibilities—or six, if we allow a space after the first period (O. K., o. k.).

  If we’re texting instead of talking, the shorter and simpler k rules. In a New Yorker review of a book on text messaging, Louis Menand declares, “The most common text message must be ‘k.’ It means ‘I have nothing to say, but God forbid that you should think that I am ignoring your message.’” The medium is new, and so is that abbreviation, but not the message; a century and a half earlier, OK served a similar function in telegraphy, confirming that a message had been properly received.

  Of course, the variation in spelling doesn’t stop there. If we think of OK as a word, why shouldn’t it be spelled like an ordinary word? In ordinary writing, when we aren’t texting, we don’t use MLE for Emily, DK for decay, or TDS for tedious. So it is more conventional and less conspicuous to render OK as okay (or occasionally okeh or okey).