Two letters dotted the six or seven tabs in my browser window like spring mushrooms after a heavy rain: OK.
Photo: Sylvar, Flickr
I’d taken just a minute to consult the Online Etymology Dictionary to confirm that it was okay to use the word okay in 19th century dialogue. An hour later, I was completely engrossed in the drama of OK’s checkered past: historians calling out lexicographers, newspaper columnists slinging angry ink in all directions, and scholarly head scratching by noted ethnologists, sociologists and linguists.
OK was complicated. An enigma. It had a history.
The saga begins with the abbreviation rather than the longer word. It first appeared in an 1839 Boston Morning Post article about a group known as the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society. The common use of abbreviations in Boston was rampant in those days and the journalist employed a jocular form that was popular at the time: abbreviations of intentionally misspelled phrases. O.K. stood for oll korrect and joined K.G. for know good and K.Y. for Know Yuse as favored alphabetic reductions. The journalist was displaying his cultural savvy, his 19th century hipness.
OK’s celebrity reemerged a year later when it was hijacked for the re-election campaign of the unquestionably hip Martin van Buren. Some of the President’s supporters formed the O.K. Club, a campaign organization christened after van Buren’s popular moniker, Old Kinderhook, his New York state hometown. The O.K. Club railed incessantly against van Buren’s backwoods opponent, William Henry Harrison, utilizing OK in every conceivable manner for slogans and political invectives to taint Harrison’s Log Cabin Campaign. But the O.K. Club’s efforts went unrewarded as Tippecanoe was elected the 9th President of the United States by a healthy margin.
OK owes its third and most successful breath of life to the introduction of modern communications in the form of the telegraph. A few short years after the 1840 Presidential campaign, Americans nationwide developed a dependency on Samuel Morse’s wired wonder. Since telegrams were priced per character, people quickly reverted to using abbreviations to save money. OK, like the modern twitterati’s LOL or LMAO, became a device of necessity.
Having uncovered the mystery of the abbreviation, I was still left with an unanswered question about the word okay. How did it evolve? Was it an alternate form from the same period or one that developed later?
The answer is unclear. It may have come into use when researchers were still arguing that the word was an anglicized form of the Choctaw okeh or Lakota hokaheh or even the Scottish och aye. Researchers, exhausted by the shorter form’s crazy roller coasters ride, more than likely elected to leave that rabbit hole unexplored.
As for me? I’m using it in dialogue so both OK and okay are ok(ay). That it was in use in 1839 is all that matters to me. Now, if only I could remember the rest of the dialogue I was writing…